Some people say the printed page is on a slow, inexorable, march towards death, we tend to agree. However, there is still hope in the dismal newspaper world. The video below demonstrates how taking a design centered approach to a newspaper can help it beat the technology revolution; the designer in question, Jacek Utko, looks at a newspaper as one complete work – as opposed to a series of articles. He then applies fabulous layout, typography and consistency to produce a product people want to purchase – what a crazy idea! His main point is this, “Any industry, no matter how dull and boring, can be made great. It only takes determination, vision, drive and an understanding that good is not good enough”

We apply this philosophy everyday at Nimonik, constantly improving the technology and content. From our point of view, there is a tremendous opportunity to improve environmental management, it simply takes drive and determination. Take a look at this wonderful, inspirational, 6 minute talk on rising above mediocrity and beating the odds.

Update: Here is an interview with Jacek Utko, where he states that newspapers will die, and jut before death, will be at their finest (design) hour.

George Monbiot remains unconvinced by the latest in green miracles: biochar, a form of carbon capture, long ago discovered by indigenous people of the Amazon who used it to create fertile dark earth.

A recent story by Bloomberg News indicates Exxon, of the infamous Exxon Valdeez, is still using single hull ships to move oil around the world. In fact, they used more single hull vessels last year than the next 10 oil companies combined.In their defense, Exxon saves money with this practice

Exxon saved an estimated $18 million last year using single-hull vessels, based on the number of times it hired such ships multiplied by 2008 rental rates from Drewry Shipping Consultants Ltd. and average durations compiled by Bloomberg. Hiring a double-hull replacement for SeaRiver Long Beach for a year would have cost about $25 million using the same rates.

How ridiculous. As most countries are phasing out single hull tankers (The US in 2015, EU in 2013 and the UN next year), Exxon still uses them. When will companies learn that a little extra cost can make a huge difference for the environment and save you money in the long term – the Valdeez spill cost Exxon 7 billion dollars.

On another note, Bloomberg seems to have cut their Environment News Feed on the iPhone, what’s going on with that?

I have already blogged on the pitfalls of enterprise software, but for our 100th post, I thought I would return to the subject.  Last week, we attended the AMERICANA tradeshow and conference where we met prospective clients. Many showed interest. Now the question becomes, how do we efficiently convert those interested people into paying clients? They realize we offer a solution, we know they have a problem, but how much time should we devote to speaking with each potential client?

The more time we spend time selling, the higher our operating costs, the higher our costs, the higher our price. We want to keep our costs low and invest in the product, not salesmen. An exellent description of this problem was recently given by Paul Graham,

Joel Spolsky recently spoke at Y Combinator about selling software to corporate customers. He said that in most companies software costing up to about $1000 could be bought by individual managers without any additional approvals. Above that threshold, software purchases generally had to be approved by a committee. But babysitting this process was so expensive for software vendors that it didn’t make sense to charge less than $50,000. Which means if you’re making something you might otherwise have charged $5000 for, you have to sell it for $50,000 instead.

The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company doesn’t waste money. And yet the result is that the company pays 10 times as much.

Checks on purchases will always be expensive, because the harder it is to sell something to you, the more it has to cost.

So, what is a small company to do? Please help us offer you the best service at the best price by avoiding comittees and long sales cycles. Try us out for a few months, no obligations. If it works, scale Nimonik across all your facilities, if not, just say goodbye. We think you’ll stay.

The Local Government Association, a UK government agency, has created a ‘blacklist‘ of words for council communication. The list includes items like ‘Capacity Building’, ‘Worklessness’ and some more dubious ones such as ‘Capacity’ and ‘Bottom-Up’. Generally speaking, a list of banned words seems like a good idea, it forces you to rethink your sentence structure and how you explain initiatives or concepts.

In an attempt to sound smart or forward thinking, organisations use abstract terms to explain simple concepts. Capacity Building? How about teaching and learning? Management and Sustainability consultants, too often, rely on complicated terms to upsell their services and maintain an aura of deep thinking. The end result is a document full of fancy words that no one really understands. Keep it Simple, Stupid.