Who do you trust to “do what is right?” Your answer to that question will depend on how you interpret it, though we don’t think there’s too much room for ambiguity with the results from Edelman’s 11th annual Trust Barometer survey. It shows the tech industry a clear 10 percent ahead of the rest of the corporate world in terms of trustworthiness, with the automotive (a favorite of ours) and telecommunications (really?) sectors following up in second and third. The results come from the polling of 5,075 “informed” members of the public from 23 nations. We reckon all the companies involved in making the business of chipmaking quite so reputable should pat themselves on the back — unless their names are Motorola, Samsung or Sony Ericsson, those guys’ failures with Android updates haven’t really contributed to the credibility of their industry at all.
While many devices have become popular across generations, younger adults are leading the way in increased mobility, preferring laptops to desktops and using their cell phones for a variety of functions.
Today, RecycleMatch — a Houston-based startup that helps businesses sell or give away stuff to recyclers and manufacturers so that they don’t have to send it to a landfill — took its online marketplace out of beta, unveiling several new features and services.
If the site performs as hoped, RecycleMatch could become the Alibaba, eBay or Amazon of waste-management and manufacturing, while helping just about any company improve its sustainability profile.
Among the materials RecycleMatch helps businesses take out of the landfill-bound waste stream are: “commodity recyclables” including paper, steel, plastic and glass; wastewater; consumer electronics and business equipment (a.k.a. e-waste); and food waste.
How do you “recycle” food waste, exactly? [ed: Besides throwing overripe tomatoes around in Valencia, Spain’s famous annual Tomato Battle…] One soup maker uses RecycleMatch to sell its wasted product to renewable energy companies that purchase or pick it up to turn it into biofuel.
The startup, whose offices are in Houston and Austin, recently attained a series A investment from a fund that it hasn’t yet revealed, and is putting the undisclosed capital towards sales and marketing, as well as website development. A few months ago, RecycleMatch brought on a new chief executive, Chris Porch, a serial entrepreneur who earlier worked in c-suite levels positions at Zag.com and BetweenMarkets, other online marketplace businesses.
RecycleMatch founder, Brooke Farrell, spoke with TechCrunch about her inspiration to start this business (bringing on her brother-in-law Chad Farrell as co-founder) in the fall of 2009. The environmental and financial costs of sending business and industrial waste to landfills in the United States could be, and must be reduced she thought, while studying EPA data and tuning in to blogs and trades about trash and the environment.
She noted on Tuesday:
“For each one pound of waste generated by a consumer in the United States today, there are 60.31 lbs. of commercially generated manufacturing and industrial waste that were generated in the production of those goods. Companies pay on average, in the U.S. $45 per ton tipping fees to send that waste to landfills.”
The new RecycleMatch website features the following services for buyers and bidders of recyclable or re-usable materials:
1. Anonymous listings and messaging between buyers and bidders, that protects companies from revealing to the public what is in their waste stream.
2. Specialized bidding that…
a. lets buyers bid on materials, or find materials they need for free one time, or on a regular, weekly or monthly basis.
b. allows sellers to choose among bidders who offer the best price, or are in the most convenient location to arrange a pick-up, or have an intended use for the materials that the sellers can appreciate.
4. Reputation management system where buyers and sellers rate and are able to respond to one another, unlike the Yelp model. The reputation scores and reviews will be monitored by RecycleMatch’s customer service team.
Porch believes RecycleMatch will lower the cost of innovation in materials science and renewable energy. He said:
“When there was damage done to a big building in Houston after a hurricane, people could not deal with a lot of the glass waste, because of a particular kind of film that was on it. We matched the company [that had to clean up this glass] with another that took it, and crushed it to make countertops.
There are so many innovative ways to reuse materials instead of dumping them in a landfill. We make it possible for this to happen, across state lines, and in a way that’s affordable for all involved.”
With its new leadership and website in place, Farrell predicted:
“RecycleMatch should grow within orders of magnitude this year. Right now, we’re looking at several hundred listings on our site. We expect to see five or ten thousand listings within a year.”
Editor’s note:
A reader asks how RecycleMatch plans to make money. According to CEO Porch, RecycleMatch uses “a performance based business model.” The site and service is free for those who want to register and list materials for sale, and to those who bid as buyers.
The company charges 5% commission for material sold on the site. If material is given away free, RecycleMatch charges $5 a ton for whatever material is picked up by a “buyer.” Porch and Farrell said those listing materials on RecycleMatch save money by not paying tipping fees at landfills, which according to the company are on average, in the U.S., $45 per ton.
Hacks of the uber-popular Microsoft Kinect have become an art form of late, and a recent music video created for the band Echo Lake is no different.
Reminiscent of Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video, the above vid — created by filmmaker Dan Nixon — has a tech-flavored spin.
Nixon says in a blog post on the band’s Tumblr: “As far as I know (and I’m scared of checking) this is the first music video to be made with the Microsoft Kinect camera. The footage was shot on that piece of £130 equipment and recorded to custom software running on a laptop. The depth data was then manipulated to get the whole band in one ’space’ and then the fun started.”
The single in the video, “Young Silence,” comes from the band’s upcoming disc by the same name, which debuts on Valentine’s Day.
The latest events in Egypt have emphasized how important the Internet has become in our lives. The public upheaval in Egypt has been spontaneously organized by citizens on the streets and through Internet services such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. Egyptians have been posting information about the happenings to the web as well as calling out for action which others have picked up and followed. Outside Egypt, the world has been following reports coming out through classical communication mediums like radio and TV but also through a myriad of websites which have continuously posted reports about the happenings.
Beyond the democratization of information that now flows directly from and to people on the web, the events have shown that it is getting harder and harder to ignore or disconnect the web. When Facebook and Twitter were blocked by the government, people found ways around the block by using proxy sites that others have setup around the world for them to use as a proxy against those services. When the government realized the block is ineffective, it disconnected the entire Internet to prevent communications. However, this resulted in the paralysis of the economy which then was standing still. Since so much of the communications traffic is now going through the internet, disconnecting it is paralyzing. Communications are difficult, websites are down, some phone lines do not work, commerce and payments are problematic, and so forth. It is akin to disconnecting electricity which modern life has become so dependent on.
As the Internet evolves further in the next years, it will become more and more difficult to ignore or disconnect it. Uptime and reach-ability are transitioning from a nice to have function into a necessity; for whole economies as well as individual businesses and websites, uptime will be the lifeblood of their being.
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