Everyone knows that the dudes at Snowbroader are totally cool but what they just did for the Planet is out of this world!
One of Laneo’s 1st members and co-founder of Snowbroader, Nicolas, just sent me the link to their new on-line store and blew me away when he announced that for every item sold, 1€ was going to be donated to Laneo to help clean up our playground!
If that isn’t concrete stuff, I don’t know what is.
Check out their blog and spread the word; the more we are, the more we can do!
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: websites, community
Here’s an interview of 2 French sailors, and members of Laneo, who share with us some interesting views on their sport, the sailing industry and the environment. This interview is in French as it refers to many untranslatable facets of this culture and I think it’s only fair for those French speaking members of Laneo and our readers to be able to listen to their compatriots in “Molière’s language”. Plus, we’ll be doing more and more interviews of Laneo members around the world and these will be conducted (if possible) in the local language.
If you’d like to hear & read more about these two passionate sailors, please check out their blogs:
Alexandre – www.alexsailing.com
Laurent – www.laurentgouezigoux.com
Enjoy !
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: interviews, community
Our friends at JIWOK (they’ve enrolled over 120 members) have just launched a cool new MP3 Training Program to help everyone achieve their goals while having fun. The originality is that this service is delivered via the web onto any MP3 device and includes not only great music (under a Creative Commons license) but real scientific based coaching that is synced to the tracks. Anyone who has ever done any running knows what it’s like constantly gazing at your wristwatch computer looking for indications on whatever parameter you programmed if for, while trying to maintain a specific rhythm! Result – you almost get seasick while doing it. What’s neat about this is now it’s the music that tells you when to make your effort or to cool down and even better, you can choose from a wide range of training programs and different types of music, so you have an endless variety of material to get you out the door! And if that wasn’t enough, it’s free and you can join the community and share whatever crosses your mind with other athletes around the world!
Take a minute and check them out, they’re really great guy’s at JIWOK and just like us – they want to “save our playground”!
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: music, sports, community, news
As I mentioned in a previous post, we’re starting to receive some great initiatives from around the world in the form of short sport oriented videos that focus on eco-sports initiatives to demonstrate what exactly “reclaiming our playground” means.
Here’s the 1st of what we hope will be an international series of mini-movies that has been launched by Courbevoie Triathlon (just outside Paris, France) and in this sequence, we’re going “behind the scenes” to one of their prepatory meetings.
Enjoy !
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: films, sports, community
Great article on how simple ideas (Tapping into Great Ideas by Oli Barrett ) can produce big effects and why Laneo is part of it.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: websites
Laneo attended the LIFT 08 Conference in Geneva last week, a conference about the challenges and opportunities of technology in our society. In the same category as DLD 08 (see post below) but very different in style and flavor, LIFT was once again an excellent venue for spreading the word on Laneo’s mission and also a true learning experience. Some of the keynotes that caught my eye (and ear’s) were the following:
- Younghee Jung, Anthropologist working for Nokia in Tokyo & Paul Dourish, a researcher from University of California Irvine about user experience.
- Rafi Haladjian, founder of Minitel start-ups and internet/wi-fi providers in France about his latest venture; Violet.
- Tom Taylor from Headshift, talk about how to use peer pressure and social networking to get ordinary people to change their behavior in favor of more sustainable activities.
You can see full-screen videos of the presentations here VPOD.TV
LIFT 08 is an example, and there are others, that bringing together a very wide variety of people from around the world to promote and facilitate discussion about new technologies and their impact on our society, is really effective.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: technology, society, community
The most significant piece of the new website (Kilimanjaro release) is without doubt the Eco-Cleanup section. As you know, Laneo’s goal is to make it easy to cleanup the planet and our business model is dedicated to optimizing the flow of resources to grassroots projects. We’ve been working extremely hard over the past 6 months to find grassroots cleanup projects around the world by scouring the web and activating all our networks. At the moment, we’re in discussion with close to 100 projects in 16 countries, which I hope will result in 20 – 30 being selected and displayed on our website in just a few weeks. This will enable you to start taking action by support the projects, voting for them (which will give it a greater “weighting” for our corporate partners sponsorship), volunteering for them (we’ll put you in touch with the organizers), telling your friends about them (which will raise awareness) and donating to them (100% of your donations will go directly to the projects.) Corporate support remains the principal source of funding and our goal is to see that at least 80% of all the projects we present in this first round receive sponsorship through corporate involvement permitting each event to fully achieve their objectives.
There are a lot of other features we’ll be adding to this section of the website over the next months so don’t miss our upcoming email announcements and start taking action to cleanup our playground!
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: laneo website
The ISPO Winter 08 Tradeshow was yet another great show, constantly growing and improving over previous editions. At the core of this event was the 7th Volvo Sports Design Forum, which this year was centered on Eco-Design and dedicated to the topic of sustainability in the field of industry and sports design. Eco-Design criteria included classic product development elements such as economy, safety, dependability, ergonomics, technical solutions and aesthetics added to this year’s ecological objectives of integrating a systematic ecological process into the early stages of product planning, development and design. Laneo was especially proud to see some of our Partners on stage; Dr.Georg Bauer, Director R&D at Atomic GmbH was a keynote speaker and did a marvelous job at making everyone understand the extremely complex design and production process and present Atomic’s very inspiring ground breaking work on environmental issues. Another partner, Salomon Snowboards won the Board Equipment category with their Bamboo Fiber based Snowboard, the Sickstick.
Overall, we’re starting to see an increasing number of Eco-Initiatives (I counted 38 during my 4 day tour) but Laneo is still concentrated on supporting companies that make measurable headway in reducing CO2 output and use less toxins and more sustainable materials (the leaders) and not just Carbon Offsetting and other Marketing tools (the followers).
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: brands, shows
This is our 3rd year at this annual tradeshow, ISPO, which involves all of the actors in the Industry focusing on winter sports. Those that follow this blog know that Laneo does not have a booth at this event. We attend to promote our cause to industry executives and treat this as an opportunity to install and nourish long-term relationships that are the basis of our mission. One executive last year asked my why we didn’t have any scantly clad young women wandering around the show enrolling new members…, I think he missed the point (and his company is still not doing anything for nature preservation either). This year marks a new era for Laneo. We have now been around for a full year and are launching a series of new services especially the Eco-Cleanup Series, so I am really looking for a strong signal from our partners & prospects in supporting these events and starting to take some concrete action in favor of our “playground”.
Stay tuned for more news from the ISPO Winter Tradeshow!
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: shows
There are a number of Digital-Media-Web-Social-Science-Lifestyle events around the world for example: TED, Le Web 3, Lift, Picnic, SIME to name a few and they all host a wide variety of fascinating speakers that address issues and future trends around the internet. What makes the DLD venue (short for Digital Life and Design) in Munich so compelling is that it is more than just bringing together people in the web industry. It creates an inspiring bridge between the key developments on the web and other important inclinations in lifestyle (physics, art, architecture, genetic programs, health and of course media) spun together with an eclectic crowd coming from all areas of the planet. Laneo had the privilege to be invited to DLD08 this year (thanks Rupert). We attend a few of these basically because they’re the only social-business network where almost everyone completely understands what we’re doing and how we’ve set out to achieve it but also spontaneously offers a vast and rich array of suggestions and support that continue to fuel our growth. Rubbing shoulders with the hottest internet ventures in the world is inspiring but more importantly, it was while talking with these entrepreneurs that made for some passionate conversations – in a world made up of increasing “virtual endeavors” – Laneo (I’m proud to say), stopped the majority of my counterparts in their tracks and got them thinking about “reality”.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: shows, society
Our industry partners are a very important piece of the Laneo model. Not only do they provide funding for eco-cleanup projects (directly and indirectly) but they are also our “partners” in wanting to see the planet cleaned up. You can’t tackle a problem this big without a team of highly committed and skilled players and there’s no better way than joining forces with those that understand the outdoors. Our goal is to provide these companies with unrivaled opportunities that will add value to their organizations – which is why the Laneo concept is a “sustainable” solution for nature preservation. In order to accomplish this, we’re starting a series of updates to the “partner areas” of our website with the “Kilimanjaro release” and progressively adding features that will be extremely innovative. Our first task is to help the community (members & visitors) better understand how our partners participate in Laneo. We plan to role out new information and new features almost every month and refine them over time, giving everyone time to get to know how to use them. This is based on our “interestingness concept” which is a fundamental piece of our strategy.
Stay tuned for this and other upcoming launches and remember; donating your opinion on-line can do much more than you think, to help save our planet!
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: laneo website
It’s been over a year since we launched the Laneo website and we’ve gone through the typical Alpha – Beta – Gamma cycle which was a lot of work (over 100 pages designed & coded and 85,000 words translated into 11 languages). After much feedback (from Members, Partners & Prospects) we have decided to complete a significant makeover that we’re calling the “Kilimanjaro release” after one of the world’s highest summits (extremely affected by climate change and pollution, as you might already know from the scientific community and documentaries and photos). We plan to tackle about 12 new pages with an equal number of new functions in the next 6 weeks – all designed to accompany our repositioning that I will unveil shortly. In the upcoming posts I will discuss what you can expect. Of course as with any project of this kind, most of the work is “under the flotation line” (like an iceberg) so you probably won’t get as excited as we are with all the “back-end functionality”. But suffice to say the makeover will enhance Laneo’s capability to be even more efficient, thus freeing up our resources to do what we do best; – cleaning up the planet!
Thanks again to the enormous input and help from the dedicated teams at Door 12 Creative, Chase the Web and Traducteo for their work.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: laneo website
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