“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

A great compilation of the very best Women In Tech: 2009

http://www.fastcompany.com/women-in-tech/2009

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

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

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.

Fast Company: Greatest Gadgets of 2008

There are two kinds of companies in the Valley: those that make money, and those that don’t have to. As the economy worsens, the former group behaves like firms in other sectors, making cuts and revising earnings expectations. For the latter group, living in a VC-backed candyland, it’s as good a time as any to spend half a billion dollars on something fun.

So it was this week with two contrasting companies: Adobe [ADBE [1]] and Facebook. Adobe announced Thursday that it will miss its earnings targets for its fourth quarter ending November 28th, 2008, and will implement a restructuring program that will eliminate 600 full time jobs worldwide. Facebook, meanwhile, tried to buy Twitter for $500 million, despite the fact that it doesn’t make any money, and seems to need increasingly more capital to function.

Adobe’s misfortunes are yet another indication that technology companies, usually insulated from larger economic fluctuations, cannot remain buoyant amidst the global economic crisis. The company had projected revenues of between $925 million and $955 million, but said Thursday that it would only achieve $912 to $915 million.

The gap in revenue Adobe attributes to weak sales of its new Creative Suite 4 software, which was released in October. To make up the difference, the company will eliminate 600 full-time positions, which an Adobe spokesperson says will affect “Everyone across the board, all regions, and all business areas.” The cuts should should save Adobe tens of millions of dollars, much of which can be recorded in the fourth quarter of 2008. The spokesperson declined to say whether Adobe will re-hire any of those positions should the economy show signs of recovery.

Facebook’s profligacy seems irrational by comparison. The company is predicted to earn revenues of only about $300 million this year, which is about the same as the overhead it takes to keep the office running, according to Michael Arrington [2]. But that hasn’t stopped the social network from reportedly trying to buy Twitter with a combination of cash and stock options. Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams, declined the offer.

Twitter doesn’t make any money either; its revenues are close to zero. Both companies are well capitalized, but reports of Facebook’s CFO flying around the world talking to sovereign wealth funds suggest that Facebook is growing too fast for its own good, and reaching a hunger for capital that US firms simply can’t — or won’t — surfeit. Twitter too is reportedly [3] putting revenue at the top of its list of things to do, in anticipation of a weakening fundraising landscape. The company had previously said it would wait until 2010 to worry about making money.

While I don’t doubt that juggernaut Facebook has its telescopes pointed in the right direction, it’s hard not to second guess the company’s prospects. If it is to ever become profitable, it will need to learn how to monetize a tool that gleans 3 out of 4 of its users from overseas, and sells famously ineffectual advertising space. Owning and managing another unprofitable Web entity would only exacerbate the problem. Had the buyout succeeded, 2009 might have been the year that Facebook was forced to come back down to earth.

[via Fast Company] by Chris Dannen

First, some numbers. The United Nations estimates that by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will face periodic and often severe water shortages. And the problem is not limited to the developing world. Here in the U.S., water managers in 36 states are predicting significant shortfalls within the next decade. Even in regions that do have sufficient supplies, aging infrastructure, inadequate treatment facilities, and contamination pose more problems. No surprise, then, that battles over water rights are becoming commonplace, pitting states and sometimes nations against one another in increasingly bitter conflict.

Analysts estimate that the world will need to invest as much as $1 trillion a year on conservation technologies, infrastructure, and sanitation to meet demand through 2030. As in the past, most of the large capital-intensive projects will be done by the usual multinational corporations and engineering firms. But the extent of the problem and the demand for new technology to address it present — pardon the metaphor — a kind of perfect storm for entrepreneurs. “Small companies with intellectual property, significant know-how, and a product that’s scalable can stake out a niche below the radar of the large companies,” says Laura Shenkar, a water expert and consultant in San Francisco. “This is an opportunity that will generate Googles.”

In the pages that follow, Inc. examines the emerging water economy and takes a trip along the water trail, from source to sewer. Our guides on this journey: 11 extraordinary entrepreneurs who are creating radical change at every step of the way. Some of their innovations are striking in their simplicity. Mark Sanders’s AQUS System uses water from bathroom sinks to fill toilet bowls. Others push at the limits of science and technology. Fatemeh Shirazi, for example, is “training” microorganisms to kill pollutants in water. What they share is a vision, a drive, and an address — the sweet spot at which blue meets green.

Increasing the Supply

Born in Swaziland, raised in Zimbabwe, and educated in South Africa, Amanda Brock knows what water scarcity looks like. “I have seen and lived through waterborne diseases, childhood mortality, cholera, typhoid,” she says. “I have lived the poverty that comes from inadequate access to a fundamental resource like water. And with global warming, it’s getting worse.”

The desire to do something about it is what led the former Enron executive and water-industry consultant to take the CEO spot at Water Standard, a start-up founded by Florida entrepreneur Andrew Gordon. Water Standard plans to bring water to dry regions in a new way: by installing state-of-the-art desalination plants inside retrofitted tankers and delivering freshwater, via pipeline or by ship, to thirsty cities on the shore.

The ships, which Brock says can be outfitted in less than a year at a cost of about $150 million, will be anchored from one to five miles offshore and will be capable of producing up to 75 million gallons of freshwater a day — enough to meet the basic residential water needs of a small city. And because they will operate in deep water rather than close to shore, the ship-based plants should promise to virtually eliminate the negative environmental side effects often cited by critics of desalination.

Specially designed intakes will draw seawater from a greater depth and at a slower speed than typical desalination facilities, thus reducing injury to aquatic life, and the concentrated brine produced in the desalination process will be thoroughly and rapidly diluted before it is returned to the sea, far from the more ecologically sensitive zone close to shore. While the ship-based plants will have a carbon footprint — initially, they will run on marine-gas turbines or new emissions-compliant diesel generators — Brock hopes eventually to generate energy using ocean-current or wave-action turbines.

Freshwater already is exported via tankers between France and Algeria and Turkey and Israel. And smaller-scale barge-based desalination systems operate in the Middle East and India. Tom Pankratz, a desalination consultant and the editor of Water Desalination Report, expects mobile barge- and ship-mounted systems to play an important role in increasing the supply of freshwater — whether by addressing site-specific environmental concerns or space limitations, getting facilities up and running faster than the two to seven years it takes to construct a land-based plant, or responding to emergency or temporary needs.

Investors seem to like the idea. In March, Water Standard secured $250 million in venture funding, one of the largest investments to date for a water start-up. The company’s first vessel — a tanker that’s currently used to transport vegetable oil — should be ready to sail sometime in 2009. And thanks to recent regulations requiring that oil tankers be double hulled, there is an abundance of older single-hulled ships that are perfectly suited to join the fleet. Brock has spent much of the past year meeting with investors and potential customers in the Middle East, Chile, Cyprus, India, and China.

Whether based on land or at sea, almost all desalination plants built after 2000 use a technology called reverse osmosis, or RO, to get the salt out. Water is pushed at high pressure through a membrane that lets freshwater pass through but blocks salt and contaminants. RO technology is generally more efficient than other desalination methods that use heat to evaporate and distill water, but it still requires a lot of energy — at seawater plants, almost half the costs are for the electricity required to push water through the membranes. This makes desalination one of the most expensive ways to produce freshwater: The cost of producing 1 cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalinated water ranges from about $1 to $1.50, compared with 10 cents to 20 cents to obtain water from a reservoir or well. (Average U.S. daily household use is about 350 gallons.)

The Los Angeles-based start-up NanoH2O is working on a way to make the process a lot more efficient. The company was founded in late 2005 by Robert Burk, an engineer with extensive experience on water and wastewater projects, and current CEO Jeff Green. It is now ramping up for mass production of a nanocomposite membrane based on technology developed by researchers at UCLA led by Eric Hoek, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. In pilot studies, it has proved nearly twice as productive as existing membranes — meaning you can get almost twice as much water with the same energy input or the same amount of water for half the energy — and has the potential to reduce the total expense of desalinated water as much as 25 percent. That would make it a far more attractive proposition for communities looking to diversify their water portfolio.

Unlike traditional RO membranes, which are just filters made of a dense polymer, NanoH2O’s polymers interact with “thirsty” nanoparticles to draw in water and repel salt and contaminants as well as the organic materials and bacteria that tend to adhere to conventional membranes and decrease efficiency over time. The technology was an academic research project when Burk and Green, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded the software start-ups Stamps.com and Archive Inc., came across it in their search for a water-related technology to build a company around.

Why water? It’s where the action is, Green says. Software, he believes, has largely become commoditized. With water, on the other hand, “core technology and intellectual property are still differentiators,” he says. “As an entrepreneur, when you see the scarcity issues, and you see that technology can make a difference and that it’s still a little early on the curve, all those factors led to a decision that it would be a good time to start to look into this.”

Green and Burk moved quickly to secure the intellectual property through UCLA’s tech transfer program and closed a seed round to speed up work. In 2007, the company received $5 million from Khosla Ventures, the clean-tech investment group led by Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla. In August, it got $15 million more from Khosla and Oak Investment Partners. Now, with 11 employees and several prototypes being tested in the field, NanoH2O is in the process of shifting from a research and development venture to an operating company, with the goal of bringing a product to market by the end of next year. The market for RO membranes is dominated by big players — including Dow, General Electric, Koch Industries, and the Japanese companies Nitto Denko and Toray. But Green is unfazed. “As big as Dow or GE are, they don’t apply all their energies to reverse osmosis — if you have the resources to stay independent, you can compete for that segment,” he says. “For me as an entrepreneur, it’s an exciting place to be.”

Desalination, of course, is well and good for communities that are close to the ocean and that can afford relatively expensive water. In the villages of sub-Saharan Africa, that’s not the case. Forty-two percent of the region’s population lacks access to a safe water supply, and the impact of waterborne diseases on public health is staggering: Of the 396 million cases of malaria every year, the majority are in sub-Saharan Africa; 90 percent of those who die from the disease are children under 5. About 100 million Africans are infected with the parasitic disease schistosomiasis, which kills tens of thousands annually, also mostly children. The death toll from diarrheal diseases is probably much higher. What’s more, a lack of reliable, clean water precludes meaningful economic development. By one estimate, some 40 billion hours a year are spent collecting water in sub-Saharan Africa — or roughly a year’s labor for the entire work force of France. The work usually falls to women and children, who are left with little time for things like growing food or going to school.

Moving Water Industries, an 82-year-old, family-owned manufacturer of water pumps based in Deerfield Beach, Florida, has been selling portable pumps for irrigation and flood protection in Nigeria for more than 30 years. But its mission in Africa has taken on a new focus: addressing the problem of safe drinking water in rural villages. The company’s solution is the SolarPedalFlo, a solar- and pedal-powered pump that can provide filtered and chlorinated water for thousands of people a day — three to four times the amount that can be produced from a borehole equipped with a hand pump. Each unit costs about $15,000.

Working with local governments, nongovernmental organizations, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, MWI has been able to install hundreds of the pumps in 12 African countries. The company is just introducing the technology in Central and South America and has one unit installed in the Philippines. With the hopes of speeding adaptation in Africa, it is in discussions with Green WiFi, a U.S.-based volunteer group that is working to install solar-powered Wi-Fi networks in the developing world. Together, the companies would be able to offer a compelling infrastructure two-for-one: clean water and Internet access powered by the same set of solar panels. William Bucknam, MWI’s vice president and point man in Africa, hopes that pressure to meet the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals — decreasing the number of people without access to safe drinking water by half by 2015 — will encourage more of the public-private partnerships that will be needed for the technology to spread. “It’s a huge problem,” he says, “and we believe we have the answer.”

Treating It

In spring 2007, the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert about a new terrorist threat: chlorine truck bombs. At least five had been exploded in Iraq, killing scores of people and injuring many more who inhaled toxic fumes. The insurgents who carried out the attacks probably stole the chlorine from water-purification and sewage treatment plants, which use the chemical for disinfection. Authorities here worried about the 2,000 or so U.S. water systems that store Environmental Protection Agency — regulated quantities of chlorine. More than 100 treatment facilities are in densely populated areas, where an explosion could expose more than a million people to toxic gases.

Some say the threat was overrated. But the underlying facts were real — and for at least one company, the heightened awareness was good news. MIOX, an Albuquerque-based outfit founded in 1994, makes compact generators that allow water treatment facilities to produce a liquid chlorine — based solution on-site, using only water, salt, and electricity, eliminating the need to store or transport hazardous chemicals. (The company also makes a hand-held battery-powered version of its generator, used by backpackers and military personnel.)

The gold standard of disinfection for more than 100 years, chlorine kills bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens, and it has played a key role in eliminating diseases such as typhoid and cholera in the U.S. And chlorine’s benefits in water are twofold: it not only disinfects but also remains at a residual level in the water, preventing reinfection by viruses or bacteria during transport, storage, and distribution. For that reason, the EPA and state regulators require that all municipal drinking water contain a measurable chlorine residual. So even as new disinfection methods, such as using ozone and UV light, gain popularity, they continue to be used with some kind of chlorine-based treatment.

Safety and security alone might have been sufficient drivers to propel MIOX’s technology. But since joining the company as CEO in 2005, Carlos Perea, a veteran of the semiconductor and telecom industries, has been highlighting other benefits. Water quality is one: Using freshly generated chemicals helps avoid the development of undesirable chlorine byproducts. And because the MIOX generator can produce a “mixed oxidant” (hence the company name) that disinfects water with less chlorine, treated water has less chemical taste and odor, and there is less buildup of biofilm and algae in the treatment system. But cost and carbon savings are an even bigger selling point. “It doesn’t make sense to transport chemicals when you can generate them yourself at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the impact,” Perea says.

In August, the 77-employee company received $19 million in Series C funding from several venture capital firms, including DCM, Sierra Ventures, and Flywheel Ventures. Water utilities in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and other cities now use MIOX generators. The U.S. Navy also uses them on some of its ships. For some large beverage makers, MIOX equipment is the first disinfection step in their bottling processes. Other industrial and commercial customers are looking to use the system as a component in self-contained water recycling systems to disinfect water before it is reused for, say, landscape maintenance or cooling. “Moving water is so power intensive, such a huge energy user, that it doesn’t make sense to continue to treat it one place, pump it, live with losses and degradation, and move it someplace else to dispose of it,” says Perea. “If you have a swimming pool, you don’t fill it up and dump it out every time that you use it; it just wouldn’t make sense.”

In a developing country like India, the ability to treat one’s own water at home can be a matter of life and death. According to a 2002 World Health Organization study, 782,000 deaths, or 7.5 percent of all deaths in India that year, were caused by diseases related to unclean water. Even in places where municipal tap water is available, quality is unreliable, and the water runs for only part of the day. Much of the population gets drinking water from vendors who sell it from tanker trucks.

Those with limited means often purify water by boiling it or mixing it with iodine tablets. Those who can afford it use home water-purification systems. One of the companies capitalizing on demand for such systems is Eureka Forbes, India’s largest manufacturer of home water-purification systems. And since 2006, a Bothell, Washington, company, HaloSource, has played an integral part in Eureka Forbes’s effort to make such systems much more affordable.

HaloSource manufactures a sort of turbocharged version of the cartridge that goes in your Brita pitcher at home. But whereas the Brita cartridge merely filters water, thus improving appearance and taste and removing some contaminants, the HaloPure biocidal cartridge — packed with tiny polystyrene beads that have bromine ions chemically bonded to their surface — disinfects it, eliminating viruses and bacteria.

Eureka Forbes is using HaloPure cartridges in gravity-fed countertop water purifiers that let a family treat and store up to 6.5 gallons of water at a time. Unlike ultraviolet purifiers, countertop water purifiers don’t require electricity to work, and their lower cost — $40 to $60, versus $200 to $300 — puts them within reach of India’s burgeoning middle class.

HaloSource also manufactures products used for recreational water treatment and storm-water management, as well as antimicrobial coatings for textiles. But the company, which has annual revenue of more than $10 million, sees its biggest opportunities in water purification. HaloSource has partnered with the Brazilian consumer-device maker Everest, which will use HaloPure cartridges in countertop water purifiers, and the Chinese manufacturer Chanitex, which uses them as a component in reverse-osmosis purifiers for homes and businesses. HaloSource now has manufacturing facilities in Bangalore and Shanghai, as well as in Washington State.

In 2007, the company secured $15 million in funding from the Abu Dhabi-based Masdar Clean Tech Fund. “In China and India combined, you’ve got close to three billion people who will be looking for consumer-product solutions to problems they’ve dealt with for generations,” says Andrew Clews, HaloSource’s vice president of marketing and business development. “Access to clean, safe drinking water is certainly one of those issues.”

Storing It

It’s nice to imagine that water flows magically from a pristine reservoir or spring to your home faucet, but that’s simply not the case. As we have seen, it is disinfected and pumped along through a sprawling network of water mains and pipes. The U.S. water network, much of it built in the 1950s and ’60s, will require some $277 billion worth of construction, upgrades, and replacement in the next 20 years, according to EPA estimates. With scarcity driving water agencies to fix leaks — by some estimates, about six billion gallons per day in the U.S. are lost through literal cracks in the system — companies making high-tech metering and leak-detection technologies are doing well for themselves.

San Rafael, California-based PAX Water Technologies, founded in 2006, is focusing elsewhere, on a relatively overlooked niche in the distribution chain: water storage tanks. Though the numbers are hard to tally, there may be as many as 400,000 storage tanks in use in the U.S. today, according to PAX Water’s vice president of marketing, Jason Oppenheimer, who came to the company after nearly a decade of working on water infrastructure projects as a civil engineer.

After being treated, drinking water can spend as long as 100 days in the distribution system before reaching an end user. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when water sits in a tank too long, it begins to stagnate and settle into layers of different temperatures, as in a lake. In warmer layers at the top, the disinfectants used in treatment are burned off, which increases the potential for contamination. Even when the water is being used, poor tank design can create an uneven distribution of disinfectant and encourage uneven aging, allowing water at the bottom of a tank to be replenished more quickly than water at the top.

The traditional solution is to dump more disinfecting chemicals into the holding system, which has environmental and economic costs and can lead to the formation of chemical byproducts. Water agencies also use energy-intensive “operational cycling” — basically pumping moving water around from tank to tank — or even dump some water at the end of the line to allow fresher water to flow into a stagnating system.

The energy-efficient, inexpensive, and elegant solution proposed by PAX Water is called the Lily impeller. Featured in a 2008 design exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Lily — a spiral propeller whose shape calls to mind a calla lily — is not just pretty but powerful. When installed on the bottom of a storage tank, the impeller, which weighs less than 70 pounds, can mix up to seven million gallons of water while drawing the same amount of energy as three 100-watt bulbs. Mimicking natural convection currents, the mixer evenly circulates water in the tank, thus reducing or eliminating the need to add disinfectant. Several states require new and retrofitted storage tanks to include some of kind of mixing system — a potential boon for PAX Water.

The water mixer came to market in 2007 and won the People’s Choice Award in the New Product Technology Showcase at the American Water Works Association convention. The same year, PAX Water launched a beta program in California. That helped open up the market, and by mid-2008, the company had about 25 of the $30,000 units installed in municipal storage tanks. Dan Heimel, a water quality specialist in Redwood City, California, which participated in the pilot study and subsequently purchased a mixer for a troublesome water tank, says the system solved the city’s thermal stratification problem.

But for Oppenheimer, storage tanks are just the beginning. A floating solar-powered impeller, for example, could improve surface water to be treated for drinking or even provide basic wastewater remediation in an off-grid environment. “We think that our technology has huge potential to help natural remediation of water bodies and all sorts of applications around the world,” he says.

Conserving It

As a kid, Mark Sanders hated brushing his teeth with cold water. But watching all that clean, drinkable water run down the drain as it warmed up bugged him. So at the age of 9, he began thinking about ways to capture it and save it for some other purpose — say, flushing the toilet. Three decades later, during a visit with his wife’s family in drought-stricken Oklahoma in 2000, he took up the problem again with a newfound sense of urgency.

On the plane ride home to Louisville, he made a sketch of a water recycling system that would take used water from the bathroom sink, disinfect it, and reroute it to the toilet tank for flushing. Back home, he took the drawing to a friend who did home remodeling, and two weeks later — with a hot glue gun, some PVC pipe, and a Tupperware container — the friend had a prototype working in his own home. Sanders, a CPA by trade and at the time the CEO of a large medical practice, patented the system, built a basic website, and began touting the system to anyone he thought might be interested. The result: thousands of hits for the site and affirmation that the interest was out there.

In 2003, Sanders left the medical practice and founded WaterSaver Technologies; he picked up a partner, Tom Reynolds, along the way. After the two spent a couple of years raising money and testing prototypes, the system, dubbed AQUS, made its big-time debut at a water-industry trade show in 2006. Sanders describes the response as “incredible,” especially from water companies in the increasingly parched South and Southwest, excited at the prospect of adding another water-saving device to the arsenal of products for which customers already receive rebates.

Indeed, utilities have found that offering customers rebates for things such as low-flow showerheads and toilets and efficient front-loading clothes washers has been a reliable and cost-effective way to curb water use — and the related cost of energy to supply and treat water and wastewater. (In California in 2005, for example, about 19 percent of electricity use, 30 percent of natural gas consumption, and 88 million gallons of diesel fuel were used to move and treat water.) Thanks to such efforts, total U.S. per capita water use has declined from a high of 1,950 gallons per day in 1977 to 1,480 gallons per day in 2000, according to the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research group.

The AQUS System — named one of the 100 best innovations of 2007 by Popular Science magazine — uses standard plumbing parts and can be installed by a professional plumber in about two hours. Priced at $395 (before rebates), it can save up to 6,000 gallons of water a year in a two-person household. Cutting-edge green architects use AQUS in their home designs, and Sloan Valve — the world’s leading manufacturer of water-efficient plumbing devices — recently agreed to distribute the product. “People are just now beginning to be aware of the value of water and the dollar savings they can achieve,” says Jim Allen, head of Sloan’s water-efficiency division. Sanders and Reynolds — who remain the company’s only employees for now — aim to sell 5,000 to 10,000 units in the first year of the Sloan deal, ramping up to as many as 300,000 after five years. Allen expects the market to swell as more states mandate water-efficient technologies.

That kind of regulation — coupled with compelling economics — has already helped Falcon Waterfree Technologies, another pioneer in restroom efficiency. If you are male, and you have recently heeded nature’s call at Dodger Stadium, the Hollywood Bowl, the “Bird’s Nest” at the Beijing Olympics, or the Taj Mahal, you may be familiar with its product. Falcon, founded in 2000, claims about 90 percent of the worldwide market for water-free urinals and revenue of more than $15 million a year.

Like WaterSaver, Falcon, headquartered in Los Angeles and Grand Rapids, Michigan, piggybacks on the existing sales and distribution networks of established partners in the sanitary equipment industry (it, too, has a partnership with Sloan in the U.S.). “In many respects — on a significantly smaller scale — we’re really not unlike Intel,” says James Krug, Falcon’s CEO. “We are the technology that powers the urinals.”

Here’s how it works: Urinal manufacturers create the “bowl with a hole” — a porcelain or metal unit designed with a smooth, easy-to-clean surface. A stainless-steel housing provides a perfect seal between the opening and a patented cartridge containing a biodegradable liquid with a specific gravity lighter than water. As soon as urine passes through the cartridge, this lighter liquid covers it and creates an airtight seal, blocking any escaping odor of urine and sewer gases. Unlike with conventional urinals, there is no “flush plume” to spread bacteria and no moving parts that require maintenance; cartridges just need to be replaced every 7,000 uses or so. “Pound for pound, our system is probably the most effective water-conservation device out there,” Krug likes to brag. “It doesn’t reduce water use by 10, 20, or 30 percent — it’s a 100 percent reduction. Each urinal saves about 40,000 gallons of water a year.”

Falcon is backed by some very heavy hitters. Its founder and lead investor is Marc Nathanson, a cable entrepreneur and chairman of Voice of America in the Clinton administration. In 2006, Capricorn Management, an investment group founded by Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first president, bought 25 percent of Falcon. And its board of advisers includes Al Gore, Richard Gephardt, and former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan.

Acceptance of a waterless urinal was once the challenge. Now the challenge is competition, including new rivals such as Kohler and Zurn. Still, Krug believes that by continuing to invest heavily in R&D, he is keeping ahead of the curve. And competition has its advantages, too. “When everyone else joins in,” he says, “you know you’ve gone from fringe to mainstream.”

Here’s a fact: According to the American Water Works Association, 58 percent of urban water goes to landscape irrigation. And as much as half of that is lost or wasted because of evaporation, wind, or improper irrigation design, installation, maintenance, and scheduling.

Chris Spain, co-founder and chairman of Petaluma, California-based HydroPoint Data Systems, saw an opportunity in those lost 3.5 billion gallons. After selling a software start-up in 2000, Spain and two partners began plotting their next move. Water was especially attractive. “One, it seemed to be a huge issue that a variety of macro trends were driving to a crisis point,” says Spain. “And two, there seemed to be a huge absence of focus, investment, and innovation.”

They came across a company in Petaluma that had patented a compelling technology — a system that used live weather data, rather than preset timers, to tell sprinklers when and how much to water crops, lawns, and commercial landscapes. They acquired the company, raised funds from angel investors, and went to work upgrading the technology. Now known as WeatherTRAK, the system uses data retrieved from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites that gather information from 40,000 weather stations across the country. WeatherTRAK’s database and servers can accurately map weather conditions — wind, humidity, and temperature — for any given square kilometer in the U.S. Subscribers to the system (commercial users pay $225 per year) need only set a sprinkler controller with some information about the plants and topography of their site, and the system takes over, sending weather updates via satellite to automatically adjust watering needs to real conditions on the ground.

There are some 45 million irrigation controllers nationwide, and according to a survey by the American Water Works Association, most still have the same settings they had when they left the factory. The result: overwatering, often accompanied by runoff into neighboring surface waters. By watering landscapes just enough, the WeatherTRAK system cuts water use up to 59 percent.

Agriculture would seem to be an obvious market. But long-term contracts for purchasing water give farmers extremely low prices, so they generally have little incentive to invest in conservation. So HydroPoint has focused on commercial and institutional clients. Among its 15,000 subscribers: Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Google, Lowe’s, and the cities of Newport Beach, California, and Charleston, South Carolina. In 2007, those 15,000 customers saved a combined 6.7 billion gallons of water. Lockheed Martin estimates it saves $1 million a year using WeatherTRAK at its two Silicon Valley campuses.

Keeping It Clean

Though drought is one of the more obvious consequences of climate change, water experts are equally worried about the problems caused by extreme storms and flooding that many, if not most, scientists believe are another consequence of global warming. Long underregulated and undermanaged, storm-water runoff has become a concern for its effect on surface and ground water, as well as the additional burden that it puts on already creaky wastewater treatment facilities when it is treated.

Glenn Rink, founder and CEO of Scottsdale, Arizona-based AbTech Industries, first used his Smart Sponges — made from a synthetic polymer — in 1997 to clean up oil spills from tankers at sea. In 1999, when he turned his attention to storm water, most regulation was focused on runoff from new construction. “No one was really doing anything about dealing with the billions of gallons of rain that come down on the roads and go into our flood-control devices and are contaminated on the way through,” he says. So Rink figured out how to mold the sponge material into different shapes that would fit into street-level storm drains and catch basins, soaking up oil and debris and letting clean water pass through. Later, he developed a way to coat the sponges with an antimicrobial agent so they would disinfect water as well. The next iteration will add the ability to capture heavy metals, herbicides, and pesticides.

Long Beach, California, installed 2,000 AbTech filters in June 2004. Tom Leary, the city’s storm-water compliance officer, was primarily concerned with cutting bacterial pollution at beaches. Tests showed the Smart Sponges effectively eliminated bacteria. And in the unusually rainy year following the sponges’ installation, they also caught almost 92,000 pounds of trash and debris and 3,600 gallons of waste oil. Leary likes the technology, because unlike UV treatment or mechanical debris catchers, “it’s not outrageously expensive, and it’s easy to move around. You don’t smell them, hear them, or see them.”

Today, AbTech has 13,000 installations in 36 states and seven countries, and its 2008 revenue is expected to be 2,000 percent higher than last year’s. Seventy percent of its business is with municipal customers. But private developers and commercial entities are increasingly part of the mix. British grocery giant Tesco recently installed an AbTech system to treat runoff at a new 88-acre facility in Riverside, California. Smaller operators are employing the technology to solve niche problems — in bus depots and fast-food drive-throughs, to cite two examples. Airports, too: The ones in Newark, New Jersey, and New York’s Westchester County are among those that have installed AbTech sponges, which typically need to be replaced every two to four years; used sponges are sent to waste-energy plants and burned as fuel.

Road runoff is one problem. But pollutants from other sources are even more insidious. Hundreds of U.S. water utilities, for example, are dealing with high levels of the chemical perchlorate, a rocket-fuel ingredient that has been found in the lower Colorado River, which provides water for more than 15 million people in the Southwest, and in dozens of ground-water wells throughout California. Though the EPA has yet to set a drinking-water standard for perchlorate, Massachusetts and California have, citing health risks to developing fetuses. The gasoline additive MTBE is another troublesome ground-water pollutant, as is nitrate, a common agricultural contaminant, which at high enough levels in water causes serious illness or death in infants.

A new technology being commercialized by a company called Microvi Biotech literally eats these pollutants up.

Eliminating challenging pollutants from water has traditionally involved using mechanical filters or chemicals. Recently, researchers have experimented with using genetically modified organisms to degrade water pollutants. But until now, all these methods have had at least one major drawback: the production of a secondary waste stream of concentrated pollutants or sludge that must be incinerated or otherwise disposed of. In eliminating one kind of pollution, they create another.

Microvi’s founder, Fatemeh Shirazi, has developed what she and others believe is a safer, more efficient, and cleaner method — using so-called biological reactors that house colonies of natural microorganisms “trained” to feed off particular pollutants in water. Inside the reactor, Shirazi explains, microorganisms are “packaged” in materials and configurations that protect them from the die-off common in other treatment methods. Most remarkably, the system is self-cleaning — when the microbe population reaches a critical stage, it stops growing and cleans house, with living organisms feeding off dead ones. As a result, there is no fouling and buildup inside the reactor and no waste to dispose of — all that comes out is clean water.

“It’s unique,” says Michael Dimitriou, president of the consulting firm WaterInnovations. He discovered Shirazi’s work when he was asked to review it for a multinational water company. “It does something that’s been tried before but no one could do.” Shirazi has developed reactors that target about eight specific pollutants, including PCE, a chemical used in dry-cleaning and other industries, MTBE, perchlorate, and nitrates. The novelty of her technology was recognized with a first prize in the water category at the 2007 California Clean Tech Open competition.

Shirazi earned her Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Oklahoma State University, got her first U.S. patent in 2002, and incorporated Microvi in 2004 in Overland Park, Kansas. With $1.8 million in grants from agencies including the National Institutes of Health, she worked to troubleshoot issues with the technology. Now headquartered in Union City, California, the company has 11 employees and is beginning its first large-scale implementations. In addition to working with public water and wastewater facilities to treat emerging pollutants, Shirazi anticipates a market in treating water discharged by various industries — including the paper industry, which produces wastewater high in toxic chlorinated phenols, and the food and beverage industry, which discharges water high in organic pollutants and nitrate.

“We are in such a big mess today partly because we never thought about the consequences of discharging water that was full of pollutants,” says Shirazi. “It never made sense to me that in the name of cleaning up those pollutants, we’ve kept coming up with solutions that also have a negative impact on the environment. The idea of using biotechnology — using concepts from nature — to do this is very appealing.”

[via Fast Company] by Adam Bluestein

Family Guy = $2 Billion.

It’s not hard to find someone who delights in attacking the show Family Guy. Which isn’t a criticism, per se. Much of the animated sitcom’s purpose seems to be to stoke the opposition, to offend the easily offended. But that’s not the only reason it annoys people. There is a school of thought that says the show is hackish — crudely drawn and derivative of its cartoon forebears. Members of this school would include, most prominently, Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the fathers of South Park, which is probably the only show on television that rivals Family Guy for objectionable content per half hour. South Park has devoted entire episodes to attacking Family Guy, portraying the show’s writers as manatees who push “idea balls” with random jokes down tubes to generate plotlines. Kricfalusi has said, “You can draw Family Guy when you’re 10 years old.”

What does Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane — who earlier this year inked a $100 million — plus contract with Fox, followed by a breakthrough deal involving Google — have to say about that?

“I would say, ‘How many violas do you have?’ ”

MacFarlane is hovering over the soundboard in the control room of the Newman Soundstage on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles. Various engineers twiddle knobs and adjust levels as he looks out on a gymnasium-size room full of classically trained musicians tuning their instruments. Every piece of music on every episode of Family Guy is recorded live by an orchestra that on this day numbers 56. The only music that ever repeats, even once, are the opening and closing themes, and those too are frequently updated, just because. Now, it is not unprecedented to use a live orchestra in today’s TV world. But it is highly unusual. “All the shows used to do it,” laments Walter Murphy, one of Family Guy‘s two composers. “It’s mostly electronic now — to save money.” The Simpsons, he says, still uses an orchestra, as does Lost. King of the Hill has a small band. And, of course, there’s an orchestra on American Dad, the other show created by MacFarlane, who is now the highest-paid writer-producer in the history of TV.

MacFarlane, despite being 35 and looking like an average dude, possesses the musical inclinations of a septuagenarian drag queen. A significant percentage of Family Guy episodes feature extravagant Broadway-inspired song-and-dance numbers (because, really, why have the cartoon doctor tell his patient he has end-stage AIDS when a barbershop quintet can break the news via song?), and only some of them are sacrilegious or scatological. Among the features of his new contract with Fox is a Family Guy movie he imagines as “an old-style musical with dialogue” in the vein of The Sound of Music, a poster of which hangs above his desk. “We’d really be trying to capture, musically, that feel,” says MacFarlane, whose father moonlighted as a folk singer. “Nothing today feels like it’ll play 50 years from now, like Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart.”

If you’re waiting for the punch line here, there isn’t one. Critics may dismiss MacFarlane’s show for being vulgar, but when he writes a song, it’s going to be lush and jazzy and, at least musically, exactly as you might hear in something by Irving Berlin. It’s all part of a manic attention to detail that not only gives the show its layered humor but also has made MacFarlane a massive multiplatform success.

MacFarlane is more than just an eclectic entertainer. Stripped of its crude facade, Family Guy — indeed, all of MacFarlane Inc. — exposes itself as a quintessentially modern business with lessons that extend far beyond TV land. MacFarlane has divined how to connect with next-generation consumers, not simply through the subject of his jokes but by embracing a flexibility in both format and distribution. He has also stepped outside the siloed definitions of a single industry (Hollywood) and exploited opportunity wherever he could find it (Silicon Valley). And perhaps most instructive, his success is not predicated on his product being all things to all people. He has bred allegiance from his core customers precisely because he’s been willing to turn his back on (and even offend) others — a model of sorts for how to create a mass-market-size niche business in our increasingly atomized culture.

MacFarlane is a fairly unassuming young man. He is partial to long-sleeve T-shirts, fraying jeans, and laceless black Chuck Taylors. Various stories have described him as prematurely graying, but today his hair is convincingly black and lightly gelled, and he’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Beard stubble is a staple. The net effect is the look of a full-grown, thinking man’s frat boy, which also pretty well sums up the target of his comedy (minus, perhaps, the full-grown part).

His show concerns the Griffins of Quahog, Rhode Island, whose patriarch is Peter, voiced by MacFarlane. Like Homer Simpson, he is lovable but bumbling, overweight, and a little slow-witted (a recent plot development is that he’s mentally retarded, but just barely). His wife is Lois, cartoon sexy and much sharper; she adores him despite his flaws. They have three children: Chris, overweight and dim, in so many ways his father’s son; Meg, smart but underappreciated and ever the butt of jokes about her homeliness; and Stewie, the infant pedant with the football-shape head who secretly wishes to murder his mother. Rounding out the clan is Brian the talking dog. He lusts after Lois, drinks martinis, and has been known to snort the occasional line of blow. (MacFarlane also voices both Brian and Stewie.)

Back in the soundstage control room, with the orchestra on the other side of the glass, a bank of flat screens are frozen on an image of Stewie staring out a window, forlorn. MacFarlane tells me that in this future episode, Stewie has been left home alone while the family goes on vacation.

“Let’s try it once with the dialogue,” Murphy says to his musicians. Stewie’s quasi-British voice — inspired by Rex Harrison, MacFarlane says — booms through the control room. “Oh, Mommy! Thank God you’re home! I promise with all my heart that I’ll never say or do anything bad to you for the rest of the evening.” Comedic pause. “By the way, I disabled the V-chip and watched so much porn.”

Out in the orchestra room, trombonists erupt in laughter.

It is a violent collision of high and low — classical musicians accustomed to the Hollywood Bowl recording music for a show heavy on poop jokes — and a perfect lens for examining why this man sipping coffee from a paper cup emblazoned with the Fox logo has such an enormous and perpetual grin.

*****

It would be fair, at this point, to call Family Guy a juggernaut. If you’re looking to get acquainted, it airs Sunday evenings at 9, just after The Simpsons, which it has surpassed as the most-popular animated show on TV. Among males 18 to 34, often cited as the most desirable demographic in advertising, Family Guy is the highest-rated scripted program in all of television (American Dad ranks sixth). It is the second-highest-rated show among males 18 to 49. It is among the most-downloaded shows on iTunes and the most-watched programs on Hulu, and it was the eighth most-pirated show of 2007 on BitTorrent sites.

Next spring, MacFarlane will introduce The Cleveland Show, a spin-off starring the Griffins’ African-American neighbor. The show will be MacFarlane’s third in prime time and the first new product of his megadeal with Fox. (He is also prepping a live-action movie, but no title or dates have been announced.)

A common complaint about MacFarlane’s shows is that they are random and disjointed, with episodes that veer wildly off course for no apparent purpose. A human-size chicken, for example, has been known to show up and battle Peter, apropos of nothing, in elaborate fight scenes that mimic movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and stretch for more than a minute.

The show’s tangents are intentional, but in no way intended to advance plot. MacFarlane admits that sometimes vignettes are inserted into an episode just to fill time, or just because they’re good for a laugh, regardless of plot relevance. As a result, Family Guy is easily digested in bite-size portions — the breakout gags, like the musical numbers, can be watched in isolation, at any time, and still work. This makes MacFarlane’s show especially well suited to the Internet and mobile devices — perfect for viewing during a boring history lecture or on the dreary commute home on the 5:07 to Ronkonkoma.

Easily masticated comedy — plus a fervent audience of college kids in baggy cargo shorts bursting with disposable income and electronics — also made MacFarlane a natural fit for Google. In September, the first of 50 bizarro animated shorts by MacFarlane appeared online. Seth MacFarlane’s “Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,” distributed by Google via its AdSense network, is a series of Webisodes that MacFarlane describes as edgier versions of New Yorker cartoons come to life. Running from 30 seconds to just over two minutes, the shorts are sponsored by advertisers and noteworthy for a host of reasons. For fans, they are MacFarlane’s first non-TV venture and so exist outside the reach of censors and network suits and introduce a universe of entirely new characters. For the entertainment industry, they mark the first experiments with a bold new method of content distribution (and the entry of the beast Google into its world). This purportedly unsophisticated hack comic now finds himself, in some ways by accident, at the intersection of advertising, television, and the Web — all of which are blurring together.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that while a MacFarlane product like Family Guy may seem slapdash when you’re watching it, the creative process behind it is decidedly sophisticated. “He’s kind of a modern-day cross between George Lucas and Norman Lear,” says his manager, John Jacobs. “He thinks on a big canvas.”

Says Norman Lear himself, a man who was once also the highest-paid creator on TV: “I’m crazy about him and his work. I can’t think of anybody doing a better job right now of mining the foolishness of the human condition.”

*****

A Family Guy episode is more or less a nine-month undertaking, from first script to finished animation. All episodes take shape in the writers room on the third floor of an unremarkable office building on Wilshire Boulevard, home to MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions. It’s pretty much as you’d imagine: a conference table surrounded by rolling chairs and covered in computer monitors, action figures, and the assorted detritus of the comedy writer’s diet: soft-drink cans, candy wrappers, half-finished bags of beef jerky. MacFarlane takes a chair in front of a dry-erase board as his 16 writers stagger in drinking coffee and stabbing at cups of fruit. One of them asks the boss how a concert he’d seen the night before had gone, and when MacFarlane complains about the bathroom lines, the guy suggests he stick to “lesbian shows, like the Indigo Girls.”

The typical episode begins with a single writer producing a script, but then the whole team gets involved, dissecting each scene and line to decide if a) it’s actually funny and b) it can be made funnier. In a loose but laborious process, each gag gets chewed over ad infinitum in this peanut-gallery forum. The goal is to produce an episode overstuffed with jokes — something that gives fans plenty to discuss late at night on bulletin boards. “I think we’re the most joke-per-minute show on television,” asserts executive producer David Goodman.

This late-summer afternoon, the challenge is to fill out a scene in which Stewie and some friends are at nursery school. Ideas are tossed out in various impressions of Stewie’s voice: There’s a molestation joke, some poop jokes, a joke about a rogue chicken because, according to the writer who pitches it, “chickens just wander around the yard at some schools.”

“Is that safe?” MacFarlane asks. “Aren’t chickens aggressive and, like, poke your eyes out?”

Anyone can speak, and jokes are called out with no introduction. MacFarlane sits up front, along with Goodman, reclining in his seat and appearing in no way dictatorial. He’ll chime in, but his input seems no more or less important than anyone else’s. “If the writers in that room don’t laugh — it’s not going on,” says Goodman. “That’s a tough room. If we laugh, it’s probably funny.”

The prevailing meta-joke about Stewie is that, despite being an infant, he is the most intellectual character on the show, even if the only family member who can hear him speak is Brian the dog.

“Stewie could wear a cop hat and go up to a white girl standing with a black kid and say, ‘Are you okay, miss?’ ” one writer suggests.

Awkward, almost embarrassed laughs break out around the table. It’s a joke that could be viewed as offensive, or as fairly pointed social criticism. A digression on race follows, before everyone moves on to another idea, about toddlers as obnoxious art critics picking apart one another’s finger paintings.

There isn’t a comedy writers room in America where the banter doesn’t often veer toward extreme subjects. The difference with this crew is that the extremes are the goal. Watch enough Family Guy and you’ll almost certainly see something that makes you cringe; it might not offend you personally, but you can imagine how someone won’t find it funny. Family Guy savages politicians and celebrities, and is more than willing to tackle all manner of touchy subjects in the name of comedy — race, Islam, Christianity (Jesus is a recurring character, because FCC rules stipulate you cannot use “Jesus Christ” as an exclamation unless the deity himself is present), homosexuality, bestiality, pedophilia, the physically impaired. A favorite example tossed out by opponents is a sight gag that involved a JFK Pez dispenser in which the candy emerged from a hole in the president’s head. (MacFarlane later admitted that maybe, just maybe, that one crossed the line.)

MacFarlane doesn’t argue with the notion that many of his jokes border on offensive, but the notion that the content is actually offensive irks him. Each episode is vetted by a team of Fox censors editing with the FCC in mind. But beyond that, he contends, “There’s an enormous amount of self-policing that goes on and a lot of intelligent conversations about whether a show is worth doing. I would stack the ethics of one of my writers up against the average Washington bureaucrat on censorship any day.” MacFarlane is mystified in particular by the two things that most upset the FCC — two basic elements of human life that, in his view, are far less sensitive than, say, religion. “For the FCC, it’s sexual references,” he says. “But even more than that, shit jokes. Any time we even show somebody on a toilet, we get in trouble.”

MacFarlane doesn’t argue with the notion that his jokes border on offensive. But the notion that they are actually offensive irks him.

Which brings us back to the writers room. A source of ongoing consternation is Stewie’s inability to master the commode. MacFarlane assumes the child’s erudite voice and says, speaking in character to his fellow children, “I’d like to make an announcement: It’s the elephant in the room. I made a stool. Now let’s just all go about our business as if nothing happened, and it’ll take care of itself in due time.”

Most everyone in the room laughs. The joke is in.

*****

Seth MacFarlane was basically fated to this life. His middle name, Woodbury, was chosen by his mother as an homage to the town drunk back in Kent, Connecticut. “Some of the foulest jokes I’ve ever heard,” he has said, “came from my mother.” MacFarlane started drawing at 2 and published his first cartoon, “Walter Crouton,” in a local paper at the age of 8. At 18, he left for the Rhode Island School of Design and, after his adviser sent his thesis film, “Life of Larry” (starring a lovable schlub with a tolerant wife and a talking dog), off to Hanna-Barbera, he was hired to work as an animator and writer on shows like Dexter’s Laboratory and Johnny Bravo. In 1996, he created a sequel to “Life of Larry” that aired in prime time on the Cartoon Network. Fox development executives took notice and hired him away to work on interstitials to run between sketches on Mad TV.

A few years later, Fox asked MacFarlane, then 25, to develop an animated pilot, giving him a scant $50,000 to do it. MacFarlane emerged three months later with a nearly completed pilot, for which he had drawn every frame and voiced every character.

Fox bought the show, gave MacFarlane a reported $2-million-per-season contract, and premiered Family Guy in the highest-profile slot possible, following the 1999 Super Bowl. He was the youngest person ever to be given his own primetime network show.

It drew 22 million viewers but then became a sort of network foster child. For the next two years, Fox execs moved the show all over the schedule, trying it in 11 time slots, including in the death zone opposite Friends. Despite the fact that Family Guy tracked well with young men, the show’s ratings were low. Fox canceled it in 2000, revived it briefly the next year, then canceled it again.

But a funny thing happened. The show lived on over at the Cartoon Network, with even edgier versions specially edited by MacFarlane. Regard for the show was so low that Fox essentially gave the Cartoon Network the first 50 episodes for free; Fox simply asked for promotion of the show’s DVD in exchange. (They were having trouble persuading retailers to stock it — another in a list of miscalculations that seems inconceivable in retrospect.) Family Guy‘s audience, ignored at every turn, followed the show to the Cartoon Network, dug in, and swelled, regularly beating both Letterman and Leno in the desirable young-male demographic. When Fox released the first 28 episodes on a series of DVDs in 2003, it sold more than 2.5 million copies. (In 2005, a straight-to-DVD movie called Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story sold about 3.5 million copies, bringing in almost $80 million.)

Twentieth Century Fox TV president Gary Newman (now chairman) summoned MacFarlane to his office in 2004 and did the unthinkable: He asked him to restart production. “I had gone into the meeting not knowing why I was going in there,” MacFarlane recalls. “He said, ‘We’d like to put this back into production,’ and I almost fell out of my chair.”

David Goodman says that when Family Guy was initially canceled, MacFarlane told him Goodman’s job would be safe if it ever returned. “I’d been on 14 canceled TV shows,” Goodman recalls. “They never come back. It’s never happened before — ever.”

Fox brought the show back in a big way, ordering 35 episodes (22 is typical) and handing over the Sunday-at-9 slot, where it boomed. The 100th episode aired in November of 2007, pushing the show into syndication. Though schedules vary, Family Guy airs up to 27 times a week in a single market, with reruns on Fox, TBS, the Cartoon Network, and in 20 major markets on channels owned by Tribune Broadcasting.

“Animation is something that, if it works, it’s more profitable for a studio than any other show,” MacFarlane says. People don’t buy Everybody Loves Raymond T-shirts, but they do buy shirts bearing the devious visage of Stewie, as well as action figures, stickers, posters, and video games. Increasingly, they also buy song clips and ring tones. And Fox, which owns the show, also owns the intellectual property (but kicks a percentage of sales back to MacFarlane). Reports have valued the Family Guy franchise at as much as $1 billion. Though neither Fox nor MacFarlane’s team would confirm that number, a little back-of-the-envelope math indicates that it is overly conservative. At a reported $2 million per episode, Family Guy has garnered at least $400 million up front from syndication. DVD sales have totaled almost another $400 million, while 80 licensees have contributed at least $200 million from sales of various clothing and baubles, actual and digital. Fox’s ad revenue off Family Guy can be estimated at at least $500 million over the years. “Suffice it to say, with it being a studio-owned show, and being on the Fox network, it’s of substantial value,” Newman told me. And none of this figures in revenue from MacFarlane’s other hit product, American Dad.

Team MacFarlane, of course, also recognized the value of what MacFarlane has brought to the network. By the time negotiations on a new contract began more than two years ago, the challenge for both sides was how to put a number on MacFarlane’s worth, considering that he isn’t just a writer-producer but also an animator and actor. MacFarlane’s team felt the need to let his contract expire, “to have him on the open market,” explains one of his representatives. For more than two years, MacFarlane worked on Family Guy in good faith, without a contract. “There were a couple days when I was ‘sick,’ ” MacFarlane says. “At times, that helps bring the negotiations back when they’re stalled.”

When the writers strike broke out last year, he sided with the guild and walked off the set. Fox decided to go forward and edit episodes without MacFarlane’s participation — they did own them, after all. MacFarlane called it a “colossal dick move.” When asked about it now, he says it’s a sore that’s been salved ($100 million has a way of doing that). “They gave us money to go back and edit the shows the way we wanted, and we made nice.”

One Fox-inflicted bruise that has yet to fade involves shots taken at Family Guy by The Simpsons, a show that MacFarlane says he admires greatly. Most famously, in an episode called “Treehouse of Horror,” Homer creates a sea of clones even dumber and more dim-witted than himself. One of these is Family Guy‘s Peter Griffin. MacFarlane decided to return fire. He wrote a joke in which Peter’s perverted friend Quagmire attacks and molests Marge Simpson. Fox, he says, nixed the idea. “They said, ‘We want the feuds to end.’ I thought it was very conspicuous that this came about only when we decided to hit them back.”

What did he do? He left it in anyway, and delivered the edit to Fox, which then edited it out. “It’s still a sore point,” MacFarlane says. “It’s still this wound that has never quite healed that says, ‘We don’t value you quite as much,’ which I can’t imagine is true, but …” The thought trails off and, perhaps realizing that it’s best not to follow this logic, he turns a corner. “To be fair to Fox — for the most part, creatively they have been a very easy company to work with. This was kind of a rare lapse in judgment.”

*****

MacFarlane’s contract hiatus didn’t just buy him leverage with Fox; it was an expansion opportunity. While the studio was noodling on the deal, MacFarlane’s management team went out and signed him up with Google. The resulting “Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” is outside the bounds of the Fox relationship. “In a completely perfect world,” Dana Walden, chairman of 20th Century Fox Television, has said, “he wouldn’t be able to do that.”

He did. The idea stemmed from conversations between MacFarlane’s lawyer and agent and representatives of Media Rights Capital, an L.A.-based multimedia financier. Loosely tied to the talent agency Endeavor (which reps MacFarlane, naturally), MRC partners with content creators — whether that’s director Alejandro González Iñárritu on Babel; or Sacha Baron Cohen on his next film, Bruno; or MacFarlane — giving them funding and a share in ownership, plus creative control.

MacFarlane produced the Cavalcade shorts with a team of six writers. The animation is instantly recognizable as his, as is the humor. The shorts lean heavily on pop culture (say, “Fred and Barney Try to Get Into a Club,” which is fairly self-explanatory); they’re rude (in one, Tara Reid’s grotesque belly flab talks); and of course, they’re crude (a boy is told he is adopted by two parents with nipples that stick out of their chests like javelins; his name, they tell him, is not Michael Sticknipples but rather Albert Horsefeet Turdsneeze — whereupon the boy sneezes a turd that sprouts horse feet and gallops off).

The Cavalcade shorts are also distributed in an innovative way: targeting young males where they lurk by popping up in ad windows on sites such as Maxim.com and Fandango.com (while simultaneously appearing on YouTube). “The idea is not to drive someone to a Web site but to make content available wherever the audience will be,” explains Dan Goodman, president of digital at MRC.

Also unprecedented is the way MacFarlane is being paid. MRC is not Fox; it can’t just write him a nine-figure check. Instead, MacFarlane’s status as an equity partner in the deal entitles him to split the ad revenue with Google and MRC. Because the whole idea is new, it’s hard to draw parallels to current entertainment and marketing models but, essentially, MRC provides the funding and sells the ad partnerships, MacFarlane provides the content, and Google serves as distribution outlet, providing the “broadcast” via its AdSense network. Then all three split the proceeds. It can, and will, be replicated with other content providers. Already, MRC is working with the Disney Channel’s Raven-Symoné on kids-targeted programming. You could easily imagine it with, say, Rachael Ray.

Each Cavalcade short carries a single advertiser. The first 10 were bought by Burger King, and — in yet another unprecedented move — MacFarlane animated the company’s ads for them. It’s an option available to any of the sponsors if they choose to pay extra for it.

For Burger King, the appeal was obvious. “Seth’s fan base intersects squarely with our audience of young men and women,” says Brian Gies, vice president of marketing impact for Burger King. In other words, MacFarlane’s comedy provides a very powerful and friendly connection to a very targeted audience, one that tends to get the munchies. Says Google’s Levy: “We know where to find them, and we’re putting the advertising in an environment they’re comfortable in.”

“The idea is to take the TV experience and provide it on the Web,” says Alex Levy, Google’s director of branded entertainment. “But brought to the people you want to reach, when, where, and how you want to reach them.” For a company that likes to say it’s not in the content business, that’s a remarkable statement. Google, in essence, is trying to use its ad-distribution network to turn content distribution upside down. (Google calls it the Content Network.)

There’s no guarantee the new model is going to stick, of course — advertisers could decide they get as much value by just buying regular Web ads and avoid paying extra. But early returns showed viewers were responding well to the shorts. In its first days, Cavalcade was the most-watched channel on YouTube, and the videos racked up 5.5 million views across the various sites running them. And MacFarlane wins no matter what. Unlike his Family Guy characters, every horny frog and lusty princess and sarcastic talking bear created for Cavalcade is owned by him, and can be deployed for future revenue. And for all this, he has zero financial risk.

*****

A couple of years ago, MacFarlane nearly worked himself to death. He collapsed at his desk and was rushed to the hospital. He was sick, he says, and “didn’t have the time to stop.” So he passed out right there under the Sound of Music poster. He ended up spending, as he tells it, “a lovely afternoon at the emergency room.”

“We’ve been behind schedule on Family Guy since day one,” he explains. “In reality, you can’t do a prime-time animated show in the time allotted, so that always puts a glaze of stress over the whole process.” He takes a breath. “I refuse to let that control my life. I did that in my twenties. Now I insist on a balance.”

MacFarlane has handed off the day-to-day control of both American Dad and The Cleveland Show, and he is increasingly delegating on Family Guy. He reviews all the drawings and obsesses more than a little over the music — there is some stuff he just can’t give up. And what’s easy to forget is that MacFarlane is also the star of Family Guy. Actually, several stars of Family Guy. He voices three of the six main characters, and is in virtually every scene, sometimes playing several parts at once. He’s also the voice of Quagmire, a major secondary player, and hundreds of ancillary characters and one-timers. And, of course, he’s the voice of Stan, the lead on American Dad, and almost certain to guest-star often on The Cleveland Show. This summer, he showed up as a voice actor in Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy II and is very soon planning to step in front of the camera in live-action projects. He also intends to direct movies.

One afternoon in August, MacFarlane and two sound engineers are in the tiny control room outside the recording booths in the Family Guy offices. In strolls the actor Gary Cole wearing shorts and sunglasses. For a show that likes to pick on celebrities, Family Guy has little trouble attracting them, especially those whose résumés include the kind of wonderfully awful performances that ultimately get embraced as cult in-jokes: Drew Barrymore, Haley Joel Osment, Gene Simmons, Bob Costas, Phyllis Diller … Michael Clarke Duncan was in earlier this morning. Richard Dreyfuss is due to arrive this evening.

Cole has done the show 23 times. Today, he’s doing Mike Brady, reprising a role he played in The Brady Bunch Movie. In this script, Mr. Brady is verbally abusing Mrs. Brady in one of those trademark pop-culture tangents.

“You know, you can really go as loud as you want,” MacFarlane says in director mode. “We’ve never heard Mike Brady yell before, so this is new territory.” He then assumes the role of Carol Brady.

“Huh, I don’t remember asking for a warm beer,” Cole says, his voice quiet but seething.

MacFarlane, as Carol, flips out: “I didn’t want to quit working — you made me!”

Five minutes later, Cole exits and MacFarlane is off to the next thing, laying down lines in furious fashion, typically in three or four takes, which he then selects from on the fly. His sound engineers tag his favorite takes and move on. He swaps from voicing Stewie to Peter to Quagmire to various odd parts, including a bit as Paul McCartney and another as Vince Vaughn.

Next up: A writer is doing Patrick Swayze, who is not, as you might expect, the butt of a cancer joke, but rather a tight-jeans joke followed by repeated takes of the writer growling, as throaty redneck Swayze, “Roadhouse!” It’s another one of those cult jokes, a little snippet of Dada theater.

“Even a hair more badass,” MacFarlane directs, and over and over they go until that one simple word becomes absurd in its own right. You can already hear it as a ring tone.

[via FastCompany] by Josh Dean

Three years after Katrina, the nation’s most expensive hurricane, which cost insurers an estimated $44 billion, came Gustav. As if New Orleans needed its rebuilding project to get any harder. And yet, there’s hope.

To underscore how far the city has come since 2005, alldaybuffet, a group of creative professionals focused on social innovation, created the New Orleans 100, a list of projects that are bringing new creative energy, attracting tourism, rebuilding homes, overhauling the educational system, and stimulating economic activity. Here are 10 of the most innovative ventures.

The Neighborhood Story Project [2]: A non-profit organization working in partnership with the University of New Orleans, The Neighborhood Story Project is a book-making project founded to help writers in neighborhoods around New Orleans create and publish books about their communities. Successful endeavors include a book-making program at John McDonogh Senior High, where high school students learn creative nonfiction, photography, and in-depth interviewing so they can write books about their lives and communities. So far several books were published, and raucous block parties were thrown to celebrate the publishings. There’s also an oral history project encouraging neighbors of the seventh ward to share their life stories with one another. Every interview is turned into a poster, that is displayed in the neighborhood. The life histories will eventually be turned into a book.

Fotos For Humanity [3]: Started after Katrina, Fotos for Humanity provides volunteer photography services for projects undertaken by cultural, community oriented and educational nonprofit groups around New Orleans. FFH donates the copyright of its images, allowing organizations to retain maximum control over how they use the photographs. Images have been donated to health clinics, public school websites, museums, and musicians, among others and the photos have also been used to raise funding for cultural groups like Mardi Gras Indians, social aid and pleasure clubs, and musicians. In the future, FFH plans to run volunteer photo workshops.

Dirty Coast [4]: A T-shirt is worth a thousand words. That’s what T-shirt company Dirty Coast believes. Launched a few months before Katrina, Dirty Coast ups the ante on NOLA T-shirts, featuring slogans like The Beauty of Entropy; Make Wetlands, Not War; and Be a New Orleanian, wherever you are. The goal: stirring conversation and creating local and international awareness of New Orleans’s culture, with each shirt serving as a “walking billboard” to help brand the area.

New Orleans Exchange [5]: Mimicking how NYSE works for public companies, The New Orleans based Receivables exchange offers a means for privately held companies to gain quick access to working capital. The Exchange claims that most small and mid-sized companies have 60% of their working capital tied up in outstanding invoices. To tackle this the service allows companies to offer their receivables to a global network of capital providers that can bid on them in an online marketplace through an eBay like transparent auction process. The outcome: small companies get quick access to much needed cash flow, without the lag.

The Idea Village [6]: Founded by a group of local entrepreneurs, The Idea Village is a nonprofit organization encourages economic development by providing strategy, talent and resources to entrepreneurial ventures. The organization aids entrepreneurs by providing financial and technical assistance, offering business strategy consultation and access to technology, connecting entrepreneurs to business mentors and facilitating access to professional services and capital resources.

NOLA 180 [7]: Started in 2007, NOLA 180 is a nonprofit organization designed to turn around failing schools and prepare students for high quality schools and colleges. Over 50% of public schools students in New Orleans attend charter schools; schools that are held accountable for delivering improved academic results for children. Schools not meeting their goals will likely have their management replaced and it is here that NOLA 180 plans to carve its niche. Currently, the organization is incubating a group of teachers and administrators that can be deployed to lead the organization’s first takeover school in 2010. It does this at its flagship school, the Langston Hughes Academy, which has an education program featuring a college-prep curriculum and an extended school day that provides 50% more instructional time than traditional public schools.

New Orleans Kid Camera Project [8]: The New Orleans Kid Camera Project was created to address the psychological and emotional impact that Hurricane Katrina has had on children from New Orleans. Through the use of photography, creative writing and mixed media, children from flooded neighborhoods express themselves, their stories and feelings. Apart from helping them recover from the emotional impacts of losing their homes to Katrina, the project also equips the kids with new skills, offering them an alternate lens through which to view the world.

Prospect 1 [9]: The largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States, showcasing 80 artists from around the world, Prospect 1 opens in November across museums, historic buildings, and found sites throughout New Orleans. Over its 11-week course, the exhibition’s goal is to attract a new category of tourism to the city by spotlighting new artistic practices as well as an array of programs benefiting the local community.

Green Coast Enterprises [10]: A small real estate services firm that was founded after Katrina, Green Coast Enterprises plans to build sustainable, storm-proof homes along the Gulf Coast. The firm has worked on The Arabella at Fortin Street, a condominium project in New Orleans that was built to withstand future storms, hot summers, and high humidity. It is currently working on Project Home Again, a project of the Riggio Foundation that aims to build energy efficient homes for families whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

SDT Waste and Debris [11]: Visitors to New Orleans may notice that, of late, the revelrous city has a different smell — and we’re not referring to the fetor of tequila overtaking stale beer on Bourbon Street. Since January 2007, waste management company SDT has been employing innovative methods to clean up New Orleans, using specially equipped water trucks while adding a patented new smell of lemon and eucalyptus to the French Quarter.

[via Fast Company] by Saabira Chaudhuri