Transport & Travel

A few months ago PSFK wrote about whether ‘Eco-travel’ is possible; and now, a new eco-accreditation program set to launch in Australia is hoping to help answer the question. The Climate Action Australia Certification Program represents tourist agencies that reduce or eliminate their carbon footprint.  Run by the government eco-tourism initiative Climate Action Australia, the site covers all forms of tourism activity, including: sights, tours, transport, restaurants, travel agencies, tourism commissions and industry bodies.  With tourism declining alongside the economic downturn, the Australian government hopes CAACP will give agencies a competitive edge and attract eco-conscious travellers.

Agencies have to sit through rigorous testing to prove their businesses are eco-friendly, listing their business plan modifications to suit an ever-changing climate.

Business development manager for Ecotourism Australia Kristie Gray explains the CAACP advantage to local business:

A consumer will pick a certified product over non-certified 100 per cent of the time, given that they’re operating at a similar price point and offering a similar product.

With world-wide ecotourism sites like Green Globe setting the eco-standard for tourism ventures, the real question in these unstable economic times is whether consumers care more about the dollar or the planet?

The Age: Green light for eco scheme

A new iPhone app, JobCompass (iTunes Link), takes advantage of location awareness to find a local job. During a quick search around town there were dozens of opportunities that would promise an easy commute. JobCompass is an elegantly designed package for a career searching service and taps into listings from Indeed.com, a huge job directory. The software is cleanly laid out and includes a straightforward help section including a link to an informative tutorial video.

At $3.99, the iPhone app lies amidst a very competitive crowd and the size of the job directory will correlate directly to its success. Currently it only uses Indeed.com, but apparently other databases like HotJobs and Monster are being sought. CareerBuilder, the largest directory, also has an iPhone app that is location aware but it surprisingly returned drastically less results for the same searches in the region. Jobs (iTunes Link), the CareerBuilder app, is formated more like an inbox and doesn’t utilize a map function, but it is free, so having both tools in your pocket can’t hurt. The real question is whether a mobile job application is the best way to find a meaningful career.

The online dating community has always been a vibrant patchwork of people seeking everything from a life partner down to a one night stand.  Innovation in this market is often pursued by tough competition, but a new contender hopes to break away from the pack with location-based dating.  Enter meetMoi, a freshly launched site that pairs a mobile app to a powerful social search network.  Users create a simple profile and set up criteria for finding a match nearby.  Users are then notified of nearby interests through text messages or one can actively browse the surrounding area by simple search terms.  The principles behind the service remind me of a popular Japanese gadget, Lovegety, that Wired covered ten years ago.  However, unlike Lovegety, meetMoi can be used across any web-enabled mobile device.  The site boasts around 500 new users per day and its strength comes in its simplicity.  Given the short descriptions provided by users and the casual-encounter dynamics of the site, meetMoi looks to successfully tap into the niche market of spontaneous dating.

A quick search of the surrounding zip code with a simple criteria of users four years younger and older yielded an interesting mix.  The first result was a simple statement of goals,“Chilled out artistic and lover of music, out with the superficial, in with true love.”  One of the later results was more along the lines of what we expected to find online, “Im the mother of two cant deal with that cant have me.”  It’s unfair to judge the service solely by its users but the challenge of a mobile networking service is finding an effective way to match users with compatible selections. Hopefully meetMoi will utilize more specific search terms in the future than simply age, sex and location.

Most notably, the meetMoi service also employs location updating software powered by Xtify.  The mobile client synchronizes GPS location data with a central server and relays that information back to the web (better explained by the following image). The real-time location updating feature is currently only available on Android, Symbian (9.2 or higher) or Blackberries (4.1 or higher), but hopefully that will expand with time.  Your specific location is always masked, but it enables users to generally see if you are available to casually rendezvous.  The real-time updates will likely never make it to the iPhone as Apple is very protective of applications running in the background, but you can always access the features of the site via the web.  The real-time updating feature is what meetMoi hopes will seperate them from other dating services and we’ll be interested to see how this technology integrates with modern styles of romance.

A roadside assistance program for bicyclists makes so much sense. If car drivers have services like AAA to count in in case of breakdowns, shouldn’t bikers have the same? Treehugger outlines one way of creating your own local network of cyclists who can call on each other in the event of bike related emergencies.

Treehugger explains:

With that in mind, the idea is rather simple: using email (especially cycling list serves), flyers at your local bike shop, and social networking sites, start to organize people around the common idea of creating a network of people interested in cycling. From there, begin collecting phone numbers and addresses of people that would be willing to help out a stranded rider, and then post that list in a place that can only be seen by members of the group (a Google Group would be ideal for something like this). Ideally, you would also make a Google Map showing where each participant lives, so that riders with a smartphone could quickly and easily identify the person who lives closest to where she happens to be at the time of a mechanical problem.

Treehugger: “Make Cycling Safer and More Convenient With An Informal Bicycle Triple A”

The CityRacks Design Competition has come to a close, with this bicycle rack design from Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve (Bettlelab) winning top prize. The competition, which saw over 200 entries from around the world, called for an innovative bike rack design to be implemented throughout NYC. Ten of the top prototypes were installed and tested at Astor Place in NYC since September 30, including some less conventional designs, like the Gaudi-esque rack by fadarchitecture seen below.

CityRacks explains their decision:

Mahaffy and De Greeve’s design reflects a modern simplicity that will greatly enhance the City’s streetscape. The rack is round with a horizontal crossbar, evoking an abstracted bicycle tire. Constructed of cast-metal, the design is elegant yet sturdy enough to withstand the harshest street environments.

The simple design provides support and stability for bikes leaning against it - a smart solution to the problem posed by typical sin-wave racks.

[via designboom]

The United Kingdom’s war on terrorism has met the creative front with their latest design competition “Public spaces, safer places”: designing in counter terrorism. Created in collaboration with Home Office and NaCTSO (National Counter Terrorism Security Office), the RSA and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA); the competition is open to students in architecture and design and aims to integrate security and counter-terrorism into the process of designing places visited and used by the public.

The Design Challenge:

Imagine that the national government and city authority now wish to re-develop the site of (an) attack. As the first stage in this process, they have organised a competition for architects and designers to respond with proposals for a new public space. The city is looking for a bold statement that demonstrates its resilience and optimism and the mayor of the city has stated “we want to see a phoenix rise from the ashes.

Check out the brief here.

Bruce Sterling has closed the door on the Viridian Design movement. His last Viridian note ends a discussion on green design that he’s been conducting since 1999. In this last email newsletter,the science fiction writer and design professor has written a fantastic essay about living “glocally” and the importance of everyday sustainable, quality lifestyle design. Highly recommended.

Some parting thoughts from Sterling:

Living on the entire planet at once is no longer a major challenge. It’s got
its practical drawbacks, but I’m much more perturbed about contemporary
indignities such as airport terrorspaces, ATM surchanges and the open banditry
of cellphone roaming. This is what’s troublesome. The rest of it, I’m rather
at ease about. Unless I’m physically restrained by some bureaucracy, I don’t
think I’m going to stop this glocally nomadic life. I live on the Earth. The
Earth is a planet. This fact is okay. I am living in truth.

Another major change came through my consumption habits. It pains me to see
certain people still trying to live in hairshirt-green fashion — purportedly
mindful, and thrifty and modest. I used to tolerate this eccentricity, but now
that panicked bankers and venture capitalists are also trying to cling like
leeches to every last shred of their wealth, I can finally see it as actively
pernicious.

Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism. Like
the New Age mystic echo of Judaeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes
the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any
effective way. It doesn’t do or say anything conceptually novel — nor is it
practical, or a working path to a better life.

Bruce Sterling: “The Last Viridian Note”

Japanese car manufacturer Nissan has a unique vision for the future of electric automobiles. Carlos Tavares, Nissan’s VP for product planning and development is betting that people will buy cars, but lease batteries. The thinking behind this is that battery technology and storage capacity will inevitable get better over time, and owners will need to upgrade batteries accordingly. Makes sense - much better to get a new battery than a whole new car. Nissan’s recently unveiled the Nuvo, a 3 seat, battery-only vehicle.

[via Electro Plankton]

The race is on to build the world’s first space elevator. Japan first unveiled their plans to develop a space elevator which would take both cargo and tourists into space. NASA has since announced plans to build their own space elevator, with cable-based space launching expected to be 100 times cheaper than rocket exploration. The proposed elevator would run on a cable between an Earth docking station and satellite space platform, orbiting around 36,000km above the earth. Building a cable to withstand incredible pressure and force is no small feat, says Professor Thompson, who recently co-ran the Space Elevator Technology Session at the 59th International Astronautical Congress in Scotland;

The stresses in the cable due to its own weight are partially relieved by the mass in space at the end of the cable, so that’s not a problem. But the loads are enormous and get dangerously high once the elevator starts oscillating as it moves along the cable. The first challenge is to develop fibres that have sufficient strength-to-weight ratio so that they will take the load without being so ridiculously large in diameter that it could never be deployed.

Carbon nanotube technology has come a long way in recent years and Thompson speculates an appropriate cable could be produced in the next five years.

Western Australia has been nominated as a prime location for the Earth dock. Co-author of Leaving The Earth By Space Elevator and West-Australian Philip Ragan explains:

We identified that the Indian Ocean, about 500km off of Perth, was a prime location to site the Earth end of the cable.
A second preferred location is about 2000 miles (3218km) south of Hawaii… (which would be) closer for Americans in air time but logistically more remote for servicing by shipping.

[via News.com & Gizmodo]