Green Options

The Greener Gadgets Conference is rapidly approaching on February 27th in New York City.  Aspiring social entrepreneurs submit designs to the Greener Gadgets Design Competition in the hopes of being featured at the event and to gain some recognition for their products.  I voted for one that goes beyond green.  “Fastronauts” are not only green in that they are bike powered and teach kids something about energy, they help kids do something that will lead them to a healthy life:  be active.  Plus, as a kid trapped in a grownup’s body, I have to admit, I think they’re rad. 

The Greener Gadget Conference is being held in NYC, and will feature a slew of new sustainable products, toys, innovations, and other inventions.  You can vote online for your favorite new gadget, and the top ten vote-getters will be given the opportunity to compete live at the event.   

Among the competitors besides the Fastronaut: there is…

More advancements out of the yea-for-sun! department. What follows is a line from the description of the  the Snippy e-paper reader as put out at the Greener Gadgets Design Competition 2008:

“Snippy is an ultraportable handheld electronic viewer for textual and graphic information which harvests operating energy from the sun and transparently links to other Snippys in the area to share content.”

via: GreenStumbler.com and Teleread.org

Big news Planetsavekateers, I’m outta here.

I’m leaving Green Options and Planetsave, though not to join Tom and John in their fight against the thetans.

I would like to say it’s to spend more time with my family, but that just makes me sound like a scandal ridden Bush official.

While I probably will get to spend more time with my family now, I’m leaving the company to work on my green home project and a few other side projects. My tenure at Green Options and Planetsave has been one of the most interesting, exciting, and invigorating times I’ve had. It ranks as one of my favorite startups (out of my current total of four) and I’m walking away with a greatly expanded network of friends and contacts, a ton of great experience in green publishing, and an awesome project to jump to.

What would have been called “The GO Home Project” is coming with me. I am buying the entire project from Green Options and taking it independent. I’m still working on a name for it (send it on if you have a good one) and will be building a site for it once that’s nailed down, but we’ll be starting up right away on sheagunther.org.

The short of it is is that me and my family are moving into two tipis to live for a year before building the coolest greenest house on the planet. We have 52 acres in North Yarmouth, Maine; the leading green architect in the state; a partnership with Smart HomeOwner Magazine, and a whole lot of great energy pushing it forward. Both me and my wife Heather will be blogging about living in the tipis and I will be set up in a smaller third tipi as my office. I’m sure I’ll have many a five minute snowshoe commutes to work this winter. We’re going to do our best to create a guide and recorded history of our life and work so as to inspire others to do choose the same green building path.

It’s been a great past year building Green Options and past few months working on the new Planetsave, but I’m super excited about all the fun stuff I’ll be able to take on now that my time is freed up from GO/PS work.

Here’s a few places you’ll be able to follow along on my adventures…

- SheaGunther.org - This is my home site, where I started blogging before I knew what blogging was (back in 2001) and current home of Musings of an Eco-Entrepreneur, the most kickass in-stasis eco-entrepreneur blog on the web. It’s been dormant since we launched Green Options but I’ll be doing a relaunch with a new theme in the next week or two. We’ll be blogging about living in the tipis and I’ll have a separate page for my links/musings drops . If you grew to like my blogs here on Planetsave, you’ll want to head over there.

- Treehugger- Graham Hill was kind enough to set up me up with a writing spot at Treehugger. I have to work out the exact details with their uber editor Michael but I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve been a huge fan of Treehugger since back in the day (back in the day in the green blogosphere means two+ years ago) and have always wanted to write there. They have such a great group of editors, writers, and an amazing reach- about 25X more daily readers than what Green Options is pulling these days.

- Yet to be named website for the Green Home Project. We’ will be documenting the crap out of our experience building the coolest greenest house on the planet on our yet to be named website. Sheagunther.org is a good place to go to keep up while I figure out what this new thing will be called.

- Stumblegods.com- It’s not really officially launched yet, but my buddy Michael (editor and founder of Groovy Green, founder and publisher of Ecorazzi, chief editor guy at Ecotality Life) and I will be sharing our insights about the power of StumbleUpon at our new site Stumble Gods. Our thumbs move masses baby.

- Ecotality Life- I’ve been working as a consultant with the awesome and talented Brooke Lowry over at Ecotality on the relaunch of their blog. We’ll be getting Ecotality Life up in the next week, in the meantime check out the current site. Ecotality Life will be relaunched with a focus on green gadgets and green business and investing and should be a good read.

- Email: sheagunther@gmail.com, Skype: shea_gunther

It’s been rad, I’ll miss a lot of the people at Green Options and Planetsave. I’ve gotta give it up to my main man Jan, the founder of Planetsave (he sold it to Green Options this Spring and works on both GO and PS stuff) and pimp dad advertising sales guru man. HIC! He’ll be assisted by the talented Noelle d’Estries (Michael’s sister) who will bring her savvy news sense (have you seen the Green Report, that’s all her) and keen wit to the table trying to fill the void that my voluminous ego will leave behind.

Keep up the good fight. Keep on saving the world.

I’m putting this on my Christmas Wish List.Via Ecofriend via Coolest Gadgets, a crank powered MP3 Player ($340) that gives you 40 minutes of listening time for every minute cranked…

The inventor of the Free Play Wind up radio, Travor Baylis is back again and this time with a much better earth-friendly gadget. The device known as the Eco Media Player requires you to wind it up to play music, watch videos, listen to radio, view photo albums and even read eBooks and all that will not require you to pay for electricity.

The player supports media and data of all types on its 2GB internal memory or via SD cards. The media player is so robust that it does not require you to sync it with a computer as when connected to a PC or a Mac it’s seen as an external drive which allows for easy “drag and drop” of all media files.

The device can also function as its own record and tape ripper to capture a large record collection into portable MP3s, it also comes with a microphone for recording voice memos. Another great feature of this device is that it can also act as a cellphone charger.