For the 13th consecutive year our friends at SURFRIDER EUROPE held their annual “Ocean Initiatives” on March 21 thru 23rd all across Europe, mobilizing over 15,000 people to help cleanup beaches, lakes and rivers.
This year was again another success with over 335 cleanups taking place (260 of them in France) regardless of the terrible weather conditions across Europe throughout the weekend.
I’ve known Stephane Latxague, Director of Surfrider Europe for about 2 years and am really impressed with the work he and his team do year round walking the talk, teaching and motivating people tirelessly to restore and protect our Planet. It’s this kind of dedication that motivates us at Laneo to continue working hard to help teams like Surfrider Europe to enhance their operations and develop their impact.
Take a minute and checkout their dedicated site for this operation HERE (it’s in 6 languages and has loads of really interesting information, photos, videos, maps…).
Surfrider Foundation Europe works in conjunction with the other branches of Surfrider Foundation all around the world.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: events, environment
The very well known and admired French Journalist – Would Be Politician – Environmental Guru & Foundation President, Nicolas HULOT’s initiative DEFI POUR LA TERRE has launched a web portal aimed at Outdoor Enthusiasts. This 3 year old online community – organization has become a great success here in France providing a very impressive range of tools and services to stimulate citizen participation in the Environmental – Climate – Social issues, all of it being expertly relayed by the very charismatic Nicolas Hulot during his TV and Radio shows and other media appearances and conferences. The Outdoor Sports portal provides a carbon impact evaluation test, “how-to” pamphlets and other media tools for each major outdoor sport and links to the other services of the site in order to encourage those playing outdoors to start taking action.
This is yet another great initiative that is sure to have great exposure and we hope a big impact for the summer vacation season and we’re especially proud to see that this site has be jointly developed by one of Laneo’s good friends “MOUNTAIN RIDERS”; a superbly run small outfit in the French Alps, check these guy’s out!
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: websites, sports
For our European readers, the 2nd edition of RAID’SPECT will take place this year on June 14 & 15 at Hauteville Lompnes in France. Co-Sponsored by the UFOLEP and QUECHUA, this unique event combines; MTB, Orienteering, Canyoning, Via Ferrata, Archery etc.. by teams of 2. The event is practically “carbon zeo” and everything is done to try to reduce environmental impact to literally nothing more than a family outing, even the food is locally produced and entirely organic. Run in parallel, there is a Eco-Expo with a number of manufacturers, local and national associations and federations that help participants understand how they can participate further and there are a series of debates & conferences that animate the 2 day event for those that aren’t participating in the raid.
We at Laneo think that last year’s event was great and this year’s will no doubt be even better, so check out the event, it’s not too late!
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: sports, events
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
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