If you’ve flirted with vegetarianism like I have, then you’re probably aware of a range of meat substitutes, all of which pale in comparison to the real thing. But now Beyond Meat CEO and founder Ethan Brown says that mock meat is about 80 percent of the way to being able to sub in for the real thing without anyone being the wiser, in terms of taste, texture and appearance.

Brown made that claim on stage today at the WIRED Business Conference, where he was discussing the role of proteins in our diet in general and how Silicon Valley investment-backed startups like his own are trying to shake up perhaps one of the oldest and most entrenched industries: the meat market.

Beyond Meat grabbed headlines as an unlikely target for investment by Obvious Corp., the investment vehicle/incubator/idea factory co-founded by Biz Stone and Evan Williams of Twitter fame. In a blog post from August, Stone outlined exactly why Obvious felt that Beyond Meat was a prime investment target, and how it aligned with the Obvious vision.

Beyond Meat will become the market leader in the development and introduction of new plant protein products. Together, we are focused on perfectly replacing animal protein with plant protein where doing so creates nutritional value at lower cost. Aside from the fact that the products are healthy, sustainable, kind, and delicious, we are involved because with one company, we have an impact on climate change, resource scarcity, human health, animal welfare, and more. With this company, we can move into new territory while staying true to Obvious’ mission.

The Obvious goal is to “build systems that help people work together to make the world a better place,” and Beyond Meat definitely fits within that broad aim. On stage, Brown talked about the time saved in raising non-meat protein versus that which comes from animal sources, which is a comparison of minutes for his company’s products to days for even the fastest-grown animal protein, which doesn’t even begin to get into ethical concerns.

For Brown, a big part of winning the war with the consumer over meat alternatives is convincing them to try it to begin with, and that starts with giving them a recognizable product. Already, he says people find it challenging to identify Beyond Meat’s own chicken substitute as something other than chicken, except when it’s placed side-by-side with the real thing. But the key to wide adoption, and winning over a much bigger percentage of the roughly $177 billion annual animal protein market that exists today, will be achieving full verisimilitude. And part of that means getting equal billing with the red and bloody stuff.

“The meat counter for me is about an unlevelled playing field,” Brown explained on stage at the Wired event today. “They should be selling protein, not meat and meat alternatives. So when you go back to that section in the store it should be about protein, because often when you go back and are looking for a meat alternative, those products are off in a penalty box in the corner.”

Many vegetarians claim not to want meat substitutes that look, feel and taste like the real thing, but there’s an even larger market of people who are trying to limit their meat intake for health purposes but don’t want to leave the satisfaction of biting into a chicken breast or flank steak behind. That’s what has helped Beyond Meat’s business grow at a rate of 60 percent this past quarter, and 30 percent in the last month alone, according to Brown.

Solving the meat eater’s dilemma is a tech problem, and so it makes sense that investors like Obvious Corp., Vinod Khosla, and many others are interested in the space. But will we ever really get to a singularity point where we can’t tell our turkey from our Tofurky? Or will we all fall down in the uncanny valley just short of finding a perfect copy? Either way, it’s bound to be an exciting space to watch.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Biomimicry is an engineering field that takes cues from nature to help solve and address human problems, and Google today launched a new website at its Google Green initiative that highlights some of the ways nature’s engineers can inspire and guide human behavior. The site uses gorgeous National Geographic images along with brief descriptions of how the natural antecedent relates to the human concept, and then provides Google-sourced tools to help people emulate that activity.

Is it basically an ad? Yes. Is it a smart one? Definitely. Google manages to pitch pretty much all of its major web- and app-based offerings and services in a single slide show, with direct integrations built in that make it possible to take immediate action based on the trends they choose to highlight. You can do a local search for recycled and upcycled decorating material, grab apps and movies on the subjects from Google Play, search for maps and join Google+ communities and more. My only complaint is that Google buries the science at the end of the site in linked academic articles for each animal or plant behavior, where those probably should have been at least linked somewhere in each well-designed spread right alongside the Google service advertisements.

Some might call this empty lip-service to Earth Day, which takes place today and probably would be better served by Google powering down a server farm or two for a few hours, but the concepts highlighted (including ride sharing, composting, energy conservation and diet modification) are solid ones and would have genuinely beneficial ecological effects if adopted by large portions of the community. Plus it’s an impressive example of web design in its own right, and a look at what Google can do with content marketing models which could be a key vector for it to exploit as the nature of online advertising continues to shift.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There is no shortage of cloud-based file storage and synchronization solutions: Dropbox, Box.net, Ubuntu One, and on and on and on. Most offer pretty much the same things. A few niche players offer something special, like Spideroak‘s approach to encryption, or ownCloud‘s host-it-yourself solution. QloudSync puts forward two interesting differentiators: it’s powered by 100% renewable energy, and it’s hosted in Iceland.

From a feature perspective, QloudSync isn’t anything new. File storage and synchronization. Share links with others. Stream music and video. The client apps are open source, and built atop SparkleShare.

QloudSync runs on GreenQloud‘s ComputeQloud and StorageQloud, which offer API compatibility with Amazon EC2 and S3. What is different about GreenQloud’s offerings, though, are that they run on renewable energy and claim to be carbon neutral, without the use of emissions offsets of any kind. Users of GreenQloud’s services can easily share their carbon savings to the social media outlet of their choice.

We see a great opportunity in utilizing Iceland’s abundant 100% renewable geothermal and hydro energy infrastructure, naturally cool climate and strategic location as a means to clean up IT and greatly reduce the industry’s carbon footprint.

GreenQloud is also making a strong play for the fact that they’re hosted in Iceland. According to them, your data “is safe from SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, Patriot act because StorageQloud runs from data centers in Iceland.” This doesn’t strike me as strong reason to use GreenQloud by itself, but it may be one of several that makes them a more attractive option in the sea of similar products.

If you’re at SXSW, stop by booth #1326 in the convention center and say hello to them.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Correction: There is a Jedi meld starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_meld (h/t @thegarance)

—
BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) March 01, 2013

President Obama inadvertently triggered national geek outrage, after he mistakenly mixed up the warring science fiction universes of Star Wars and Star Trek. During a press conference related to recently triggered budget cutbacks, known as the “sequester,” he said, “I can’t do some kind of Jedi Mind Meld on congressional Republicans,” referring to the partisan gridlock that has prevented Congress from passing a budget. Twitter immediately lit up with comments poking fun of the fact that Obama mixed up Star Wars’ ‘Jedi Mind Trick‘, used for mind control, and Star Trek‘s Vulcan ‘Mind Meld’, for sharing thoughts.

Obama just said “Jedi mindmeld.” What's next, Klingon lightsabers? #Shame #Impeach

—
rob delaney (@robdelaney) March 01, 2013

A few savvy (i.e. super-geeky) users pointed out that there is, in fact, a Jedi mind meld, employed in later books of the Star Wars universe. According to a Wikia entry,

Force Meld, otherwise known as Jedi meld or Battle meld, was a technique where a number of Force users joined their minds together through the Force, drawing strength from each other. A refinement of battle meditation, it was known to the ancient Jedi, though dangerous. While battle meditation could influence both the Force-sensitives and the insensitives of both sides, Force Meld concentrates on coordinating and improving the Force-sensitives of the user’s side.

Now, did Obama use the phrase correctly? Probably not. Is he a hyper-wonky follower of the post-movie Star Wars universe? Even less likely. Did I make a horrible mistake as a writer getting into the middle of a nuanced sci-fi debate? Yes, most definitely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tesla Motors CEO and founder Elon Musk definitely isn’t the best guy to try to pull a fast one on. The visionary entrepreneur set Twitter a titter when he claimed earlier this week that New York Times writer John Broder had fudged details about the Tesla Models S car’s range in cold weather, resulting in what he termed a “fake” article. Musk promised evidence, and now he has delivered, via the official Tesla blog.

In keeping with his brief description of what was wrong with the review from his original tweet, Musk laid out how vehicle logs (standard practice after Tesla ran into issues with Top Gear, which dramatized a breakdown where none actually existed) showed that the car Broder was driving for his article was improperly charged, took an unscheduled side trip and essentially seemed to have been set up to fail.

Musk breaks down what went wrong in a number of bullet points, but basically Broder’s car never ran out of juice completely; was charged to a level which he knew wouldn’t be enough to get to his destination at one point; actually exceeded its anticipated range; was driven past charging stations which could’ve helped it finish the journey; and was taken for a lengthy detour through Manhattan not included in the original trip plan.

Other problems add to the reported deception, including climate control settings that run counter to Broder’s stated claims in the article about what he did with in-car heating (turned up the temp when he said he turned it down). The smaller details aren’t necessarily the most consequential, but the fact that Musk has record of even these smaller contradictions in his test vehicle’s logs helps to paint a picture of a writer who seems to have been blatantly gunning for Tesla from the start.

Musk says that Broder altered details and the conditions of the test to help fit with his pre-existing opinion, which he arrives at thanks to a quote from Broder in an article published in 2012. Broder essentially attempts to deflate the sunny image of a future filled with electric cars, claiming that “the state of the electric car is dismal, the “victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate.” To be fair, in that article Broder also goes on to give plenty of space to electric car supporters, too, and even gives the last word to Chris Paine, the documentary filmmaker behind Who Killed the Electric Car?, ending on Paine’s implied accusation that the oil and gas industry are behind stalling the electric future of car transport.

But overall, Musk’s evidence is pretty damning, especially backed up as it is by solid data from the Model S itself. He ends by calling for the NYT to launch an investigation into the article and its writing, and after an attack like this, I’d guess the NYT would have to do just that in order to be able to come up with a satisfactory response.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You know those mobile devices that everyone keeps raving about? Turns out it’s a huge business. Shocker, I know. Strategy Analytics recently estimated that about 1.6 billion mobile phones shipped in 2012. What’s more, according to Canalys’ report today, the tablet market grew by 75 percent in the fourth quarter to 46.2 million units, with total shipments hitting 114.6 million in 2012.

With all these new devices hitting the market, people tend to overlook the fact that this creates an enormous amount of waste. ecoATM debuted in 2011 with a green solution: Give consumers an easy way to recycle their used electronics. The San Diego-based startup has been on a mission to become the Coinstar for used, mobile devices, offering consumers ATM-like kiosks that automate the buy-back of their has-been electronics and give them a cash reward for doing so.

With the tablet market growing like gangbusters, last week, the company expanded its support to include tablets, which means that its kiosks will now accept your iPads in addition to your cell phones, smartphones and MP3 players. Over the last year, the startup has gone from 50 kiosks to about 300 across 20 states, and this year, it hopes to add another 600 or 700 kiosks, bringing cash for clunky devices to a mall near you.

To support this growth, the 2012 Crunchies Winner announced today that it has secured $40 million in debt financing from Falcon Investment Advisors, which ecoATM CEO Tom Tullie says will help provide the fuel it needs to continue nationwide expansion.

“There’s still a large percentage of the country that doesn’t have access to a convenient recycling solution for their mobile phones and other personal portable electronic devices,” Tullie says of the new debt round. “We raised this money to help us deploy ecoATMs nationwide and help people recycle their old phones, tablets, or MP3 players, regardless of where they live.”

To date, ecoATM’s expansion plan has focused primarily on positioning its kiosks in shopping malls in large metropolitan areas — for good reason — “eventually, we’re going to run out of malls,” ecoATM marketing director Ryan Kuder told us recently. So, with its new capital, the startup wants to expand into smaller cities and other types of high-foot traffic areas, like supermarkets and smaller retail outlets.

And, according to Kuder, the expansion reflects a growing demand (and growing use of) its kiosks among consumers. Yes, people are actually using the machines. Kuder says that people used ecoATM to recycle “hundreds of thousands of phones” last year and has paid out “millions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of customers.”

By doing so, Tullie added, the company has been able to save landfills from “hundreds of thousands of potentially toxic devices,” as it has been able to “find a second life” for 60 percent of the devices it has collected, while recycling the rest.

The new debt round adds to the $17 million in funding it has raised to date from Claremont Creek Ventures, Coinstar, TAO Ventures, PI Holdings, Moore Venture Partners, AKS Capital and Koh Boon Hwee, to name a few. In 2012, the company was also awarded a Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation for up to $1 million. The new financing brings ecoATM’s total funding to just over $70 million.

For more, find the company at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple has released its 2013 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, and it features a number of updates from last year, including Apple’s decision to join the Fair Labor Association (a notable first), and conduct audits of its suppliers in tandem with that outside watchdog organization. The results seem to be a tightening of Apple’s code of conduct for suppliers all around, in terms of monitoring, penalties and programs to improve conditions.

Apple conducted 72 percent more audits in 2012 than it did in 2011, for example, totaling 393 audits across facilities employing 1.5 million workers. All types of audits increased for the year, including firs-time, repeat, process safety assessments and specialized environmental audits, but the last one took the biggest jumps vs. previous years. In 2012, Apple conducted 55 focused environmental audits, which is a 293 percent increase over the number it ran in 2011. The Mac maker works with outside associations in this area, too, just as it does with the FLA regarding labor, including the Natural Defense Council, the EPA and the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs.

The supplier audits also actually resulted in more severe punitive action than usual. Apple has faced criticism in the past for doling out corrective measures that seem rather toothless – most often putting suppliers “on probation,” meaning they’ll be watched more closely for future violations. But one supplier fell afoul of Apple’s measures to protect against underage labor, with 74 cases counted at a single facility. Apple terminated the relationship with that offending party entirely, proving that there are real consequences for companies that ignore its code of conduct and local labor laws.

Apple also came down harder on companies for compliance with working hour regulations, and changed its policies and practices in monitoring them to be more effective. In 2012, Apple started doing real-time work hour tracking on a weekly basis for over 1 million of the employees at its supplier companies, and publishing data on its progress every month. That led to a 92 percent compliance rate with its 60 hour maximum work week, as laid out in the Apple Supplier Code of Conduct, and Apple says overall work weeks averaged less than 50 hours.

Another area of improvement for Apple was in participation in its training and education programs. There were 1.32 million workers trained on local laws, worker rights, health and safety and Apple’s own Code of Conduct during 2012, a 97 percent increase over 2011′s 670,000. Apple also provided more free educational opportunities to workers than ever before, with 201,000 cumulative participants in those programs, up 235 percent from 60,000 in 2011.

Apple’s transparency definitely improved over the course of 2012 when it comes to its efforts around supplier responsibility and maintaining healthy and safe work environments, and that’s something Apple CEO Tim Cook clearly undertook as a conscious effort. That’s not to say that Apple didn’t have its fair share of labor issues during the year (issues around the demanding requirements for building the iPhone 5 come to mind), but especially in the way that Apple has allowed disinterested third parties to come in and aid with its monitoring efforts, 2012 was definitely the most significant year yet in terms of improvements made to its stance on supplier responsibility.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple’s patent filings today reveal one concept outside their usual product-focused applications, detailing a method for harnessing wind power in a manner different from that employed in traditional turbines. Electricity gathered from a wind turbine would be converted to heat energy and stored in a “low-heat capacity fluid” in Apple’s patent, allowing it to be tapped on an as-needed basis whenever the wind dies down.

It all gets pretty technical, but painted in broad strokes, the system would potentially use the motion of the rotor shaft moving against a “low-heat capacity fluid” (such as ethanol or mercury, for instance) to generate heat through friction between the two surfaces. This can then be transferred from the storage fluid to a working fluid which is then boiled off to release steam. The steam powers a turbine, converting the energy to usable form.

Apple’s system differs from basic wind-power generators that are highly subject to variances in wind power, as well as systems that use batteries to store energy made through rotational energy for later use when wind isn’t actively making that much power. Instead, it is designed to make wind power available on a more “on-demand” basis, which is of significant importance for facilities requiring a constant, uninterrupted power supply. That likely explains why Apple is pursuing this kind of tech: Its massive data centers have huge power requirements, and the company has stated its commitment to harnessing wind, solar and other alternative energy sources to help keep these facilities running smoothly.

So far, Apple has been working mostly on building solar farms and biogas generators to help fulfill its energy needs at data center locations like the one it has in Maiden, NC, and competitor Google recently revealed that it has powered a data center with wind power for the first time.

In a second filing published today, Apple is back on track with its more consumer-oriented patents, this time detailing an evolution of the mouse that would bring more gesture controls to the input device. The additions would allow a mouse to detect tilting, tilt-sliding, lifting and other gestures to add additional command capabilities to the mouse’s basic clicking, movement and scrolling. It’s sort of a Wii Remote-lite, which is likely an easier control paradigm for traditional desktop computer users to adopt than anything more drastic.

The reason this is interesting is because Apple is still showing an interest in iterating on its input device design, which still requires a lot of improvement. The Magic Mouse, while promising with its multitouch surface, is in practice a frustrating device to use. Apple traditionally hasn’t done great with mice, and it’ll be interesting to see if it can do any better while adding motion control into the mix, if this patent ever turns into a shipping product.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google just announced that it has invested $75 million in a 50 MW wind farm in Rippey, Iowa, a small town an hour outside of Des Moines. This is Google’s second wind energy investment in the state. In 2010, Google entered a long-term contract to buy green energy for its Iowa data center, but this is the company’s first direct investment into an Iowa wind project.

The wind farm, Google notes, is already in operation and has been contracted to sell all of its energy to the Central Iowa Power Cooperative, which will use it to provide electricity to about 15,000 homes. It looks like none of this electricity will be used for Google’s local data center.

With this investment, Google has brought its total committed investment into green energy projects to just over $990 million. The company’s other wind energy investments include a $157 million investment in a Southern California win energy farm and a $100 million investment into a wind farm in Oregon that is anticipated to be the world’s largest at 845 MW. Google’s first wind energy investment was worth $38.8 million and involved two North Dakota wind farms. Besides the wind farms themselves, Google also owns a 37.5 percent stake in the Atlantic Wind Connection backbone, a project that aims to build transmission lines for green energy along the mid-Atlantic coast.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When Apple introduced the Retina MacBook Pro and new MacBook Airs in June, it also quietly noted it would be withdrawing its computers from voluntary EPEAT environmental standards qualification. That provoked a minor customer furor, with some government agencies in particular saying they might not be able to continue sourcing notebooks from Apple, and the company promptly rejoined the program. But questions of whether the new MacBook Pro in particular could meet the EPEAT standards, which include a provision for products being able to be “upgradeable with commonly available tools” still hung in the air, until a new rule change.

The EPEAT organization has verified the MacBook Pro, Air and a number of other new unibody laptops from Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba, based in part on the wide availability of external hardware like HDs and optical drives that can be added via USB and other I/O ports like Thunderbolt. Once upon a time, the “upgradeable” rule was taken to mean things like expandable memory, easily replaced internal components like HDs and batteries, but the shift in definition (which EPEAT calls a “clarification”) reflects a shift in the manufacturing trends of notebooks and all-in-ones, and also, it’s definitely true that higher speed I/O (USB 3.0, Thunderbolt) makes it possible to do much more with external accessories today than in the past.

The organization also had concerns around ease of disassembly, an important point for making notebooks easy to recycle and for increasing their longevity with users via things like battery replacement. Provided with instructions from manufacturers, however, EPEAT found its lab could take the laptops apart in 20 minutes at the outside, and take batteries out in three minutes max. That’s apparently even true of Apple’s glued-down MacBook Air batteries, so the company’s ultraportable gets a pass and retains a certification that makes it much easier sell to government and NGOs who look to EPEAT compliance as a way of showing off a green-minded organizational ethos.

Not everyone is pleased with the outcome, however, as Greenpeace has spoken out about the change to the assessment standards in a statement from the organization. Greenpeace’s Casey Harrell said in that statement that essentially, the process involved to replace the batteries is by no means accessible to the average user, and doesn’t reflect real-world experience since it also means voiding the warranty if a user tried to replace the battery on their own. Harrell included the following in the statement:

Is it a coincidence? It’s unclear why EPEAT caved in, but the impact is that EPEAT has confused consumers and businesses who want to buy green electronics that can be repaired and will last a long time, and sets a dangerous trend for the burgeoning market of ultrabooks.

Apple isn’t the only company floating smaller, thinner unibody laptops as the future of portable computing, but it does appear to be the one doing so with the most success, so while Greenpeace has a tradition of calling out Apple on its environmental gaffes, this time the allegations are likely laid at the feet of the right target.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch