273

Hey 273sters, here’s another great freebie from Mixergy.com, I’m addicted to this site.  It is an interview with Tom Szaky, founder of Terracycle a company that takes garbage and turns it into products.  He got the idea for starting the company when he started selling worm poop which he’d been using to help grow pot in his basement during college.  I really like the way he talks about creating a profitable marketing department, and putting a lot of effort into communicating with journalists.  Free publicity is the best publicity.

I am going to try and start posting freebies like this on a regular basis.

I highly recommend listening to this interview with one of the founders of Kiva, Premal Shah.  Just launch is his advice for entrepreneurs wanting to start a company.  Check it out here at Mixergy.com, this site has loads of great interviews with entrepreneurs all for FREE.

On Tuesday I went to a great seminar on Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Entrepreneurship.  I will provide a more comprehensive write up as soon as I receive the slides for the day but one thing I noticed was that the logos on the Slides and websites of both Swedfund (a government run Swedish risk capital fund concentrating on ethical investments in the developing world) and Diferencia (a consultancy and training firm specialising in sustainable development) had flipped the world map upside down.  This made me think a lot about our perspective on the world.  Below is the 273 Map flipped, you can see our investors in red and the entrepreneurs in green.  To me this view of the world presents a great opportunity, what do you think?

This also reminded me of a video, that I have posted before on a different blog about turning problems upside down to find opportunities, I think it is worth posting again - enjoy.

This is a such a simple idea, which is why I love it!  Hoongle is a search engine powered by Google (this means if you use it, you will get the exact same results as you would using Google) that will donate 20 grains of rice to schools in the developing world though the UN Food Program ‘Fill the Cup‘ for every search you make with them.  If you want to find out a little more, check out the New York Times Article.

So 273sters let’s help them out, I encourage all of you to use them as your default search engine.  If you are using the Firefox Browser follow this link and install it as your search box, if you are using Google Chrome simply go to settings ->options and make http://www3.hoongle.com your default search engine, if your using Internet Explorer - change to Firefox or Chrome :-).  Also, to go to the Hoongle home page, you can follow the link from the very top bar of 273.