Portable reputations and collective accountability - The Sharing Economy

This could be your life: You wake up and whip up omelets with tomatoes fresh from your SharedEarth.com garden before dressing your toddler in Gap cargo pants you scored on ThredUp. Your Zimride whisks you to the office, where you race to your Freecycle laptop to book your anniversary getaway -- a cozy Parisian flat -- on AirBnB. To zip around to the afternoon meetings you arranged at LiquidSpaces, you unlock your VW RelayRide in the parking lot. When you realize you forgot to buy those new nightstands, you hire a runner on TaskRabbit to swing by Ikea, pick them up, and assemble them with a drill borrowed from NeighborGoods. After this exhausting day, you arrive home to a hot filet mignon dinner for two from Gobble and two copies of Fodor's Paris from BookCrossing resting on your new nightstands. Does that sound good? If so, these sites can make the dream reality -

SHAREDEARTH.COM
A free net linking landowners with gardeners and farmers.

THREDUP.COM
A marketplace for used kids clothes and toys, swapped out by the box; not sentimental, but certainly practical!

ZIMRIDE.COM
Ride sharing for coworkers and students.

FREECYCLE.ORG
If you've got stuff that you're ready to part with for free, this site will direct you to new owners -- not the landfill.

AIRBNB.COM
Arguably the hottest sharing net, this is the place to rent other people's floors, rooms, homes, yachts -- even igloos.

LIQUIDSPACE.COM
A mobile app for finding available work spaces, anywhere from a corporate campus to a spare conference room.

RELAYRIDES.COM
Insured car-sharing with neighbors.

TASKRABBIT.COM
Matches people who need tasks done with runners -- aka "rabbits" -- willing to do them, for a price.

NEIGHBORGOODS.NET
It's the backyard fence, online. Here, neighbors can share home appliances, sports equipment, tools, and more.

GOBBLE.COM
Meals prepared and delivered by neighborhood chefs.

BOOKCROSSING.COM
Readers trade books with other readers and track them as they travel the globe.

READ MORE ABOUT THE SHARING ECONOMY AT FASTCOMPANY.COM/THESHARINGECONOMY or http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/155/the-sharing-economy.html

How dirty is your Data ?

Courtesy of CrunchGear - 

Greenpeace ranks data centers, names Yahoo cleanest and Apples the dirtiest !

Greenpeace just released its latest snapshot of major corporation’s impact on the planet with IT data centers the main target. The 35 page report details just how much energy is required to run the massive centers powering the so-called cloud. It’s huge according to Greenpeace, consuming 1.5%-2% of the world’s total power consumption and growing at a rate of 12% a year. Somewhat surprisingly Greenpeace sort of applauds the virtues of living in a massive data cloud, pointing to the advent of the smart grid and increased amount telecommuting. Even digital streaming music gets props for having a smaller carbon footprint than physical media.

But this is Greenpeace and so there has to be some finger pointing and letter grading. The main purpose of this report is to reveal top company’s impact on the environment by mainly examining their dependency on fossil and nuclear fuels rather than using renewable sources. However, even Greenpeace notes that these numbers might not be exact since they were calculated without all the facts. Simply put, these ten companies didn’t divulge this info; Greenpeace pieced together their data. It’s a bit dirty itself, actually.

The main chart in the report lists ten major data hosting services. Yahoo, Google, and Amazon score top marks on the Clean Energy Index for their investment in renewable energy services such as geothermal power and wind farms. (higher number wins) The Coal Intensity column indicates the company’s dependency of coal. (low number wins)

Greenpeace applauds Yahoo’s practice of situating data centers near sources of clean energy. The report also notes that Yahoo no longer purchases carbon offsets and is striving towards energy efficiency with a self-set goal of reducing data center’s carbon intensity by at least 40% by 2014.

Apple scores at the bottom of both scales partly because of its massive new data center that will draw its power off of North Carolina’s coal-powered grid. Facebook and Google also have large data centers located in the same NC area, an area dubbed the dirty triangle by Greenpeace. Facebook is right there with Apple in the rankings, but Google’s commitment to clean energy, including a $100 million wind farm investment, helps offset the coal in Greenpeace’s eyes.

Still, it’s important to remember that Greenpeace admits it does not have all the facts here. The Transparency column grades these companies on their willingness to share energy data publicly. Understandably, most don’t want to share their energy and accompanying financial data.