Great pieces on water and resource utilization

There's been a few few different pieces (and one video) I've seen recently that struck me as fascinating on the subject of water as a resource.

From a recent issue of Businessweek was "Israel's Water Ninja" by Amanda Little on the Israeli Integrated Water Network Management startup TaKaDu. It's a remarkably interesting look at water efficiency and identifying leakage on a widespread utility scale where the losses prevented can be enormous.

Related to water usage required was a piece from the Jan issue of Outside Magazine with "The Top-Secret Food That Will Change the Way You Eat" by Rowan Jacobsen. Written about the company Beyond Meat and its forthcoming Beast Burger, it's a well written and important look at the idea of getting away from eating beef, among other reasons for the huge amounts of water needed to generate a pound for eating.

For the Dec/Jan issue of Fast Company was "We're Running Out of Water" by Jon Gertner, an interesting piece that notes how water systems, and the concept of desalination from saltwater to drinking water, can have fairly entrenched markets, effectively limiting the amount of innovation and people looking to enter the field.

The last thing to note here on the subject of water isn't actually a written piece, but rather a video on the Google Ventures website with Kevin Rose interviewing Scott Harrison of the highly regarded Charity: Water. Just a fascinating guy doing important work.

Fast Company writing - on AirBnB, Google X, Preet Bharara & All Power Labs

Some interesting Fast Company Magazine writing from recent issues included looks at Google X, Airbnb, the Berkeley-based energy startup All Power Labs and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

The first piece to note here was by Jon Gertner with "The Truth About Google X: An Exclusive Look Behind the Secretive Lab's Closed Doors" and it brought to mind a Businessweek feature on Google X that I linked to and wrote on a year ago.

A story written by Austin Carr was "Inside Airbnb's Grand Hotel Plans" and it included lots of interesting content on CEO Brian Chesky and newly named head of global hospitality Chip Conley.

On U.S. Attorney Bharara, Max Chafkin wrote "The Most Dangerous Man in Bitcoin Isn't a Criminal," with a part of the story that stood out to me being mention of Bharara having hired Palo Alto-based data mining company Palantir.

The final piece to note here was by Josh Dean with "Meet the Radical Berkeley Artist Whose Company is Turning Trash Into Electricity" on Jim Mason whose company All Power Labs makes the Power Pallet that works through a process called gassification.

Interesting Fast Company writing - with features by Jon Gertner & Charles Fishman

There's been a few different pieces from Fast Company recently that struck me as particularly noteworthy with two from the magazine and two the website.

The June issue of Fast Company featured the "100 Most Creative People in Business" and the people and write-ups I found to be most interesting were Carl June at #11, Scott Harrison at #10 and Nate Silver at #1. The pieces on June and Harrison were both very short, but on two people doing important work. Harrison is founder of the highly regarded Charity: Water and June an immunologist working on cancer treatments and who was featured in "Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?" by Jason Fagone for the August issue of Philadelphia Magazine.

The write-up of Silver as the founder of the (moving from the New York Times to ESPN) website FiveThirtyEight was a fairly lengthy feature by Jon Gertner and included some excellent material. Gertner made multiple references to the two concepts in the title of Silver's recent book The Signal and the Noise (which I reviewed last December), with the signal being actual valuable information and  the noise everything else. I also found interesting Gertner's note that "Silver enjoys capitalizing anytime he thinks someone is making a decision for the wrong reasons" and it reminded me of a blog post I wrote last year that got into stock valuations and how skewed or ethereal they can be, with Facebook's stock an example of that (just as Silver noted). The final thing that struck me from the Gertner piece on Silver was a fairly lengthy portion about how data analysis (often known as big data) has potential applications for public good, with specific mention of the areas of education and medicine. Noted in the piece were Rayid Ghani who was the chief scientist of the 2012 Obama campaign and Jake Porway who founded Datakind, a non-profit with the Twitter description "Connecting non-profits in need of data analysis with pro bono data scientists who can work to help them with data collection, analysis, visualization, and more."

Another Fast Company Magazine piece I found excellent lately was "The Road to Resilience: How Unscientific Innovation Saved Marlin Steel" from the July/August issue. The feature was written by Charles Fishman, whose writing I've posted on a few times on all the way back to "Message in a Bottle", his 2007 Fast Company feature on the bottled water industry. This latest piece by Fishman profiled a company that used to solely make bagel baskets and has grown tremendously with now the large majority of products being much more expensive baskets for industrial and manufacturing environments. Noted in the piece was an interesting quote from owner Drew Greenblatt with "What I realized is that the customers who are a pain in the neck are really the great customers."

The final interesting Fast Company pieces to note here were two shorts ones posted to the website. "How Vice Hacked Google Glass to Tell Crisis Stories" was by Neal Ungerleider about journalist Tim Pool and his on the job usage of Google glasses. Also was the Sarah Kessler piece "Pixar's John Lasseter on Steve Jobs, Creativity, and Disney Infinity" leading into the launch of a Disney game offering. In terms of Lasseter as a subject, it brought to mind the profile "Father of the Year" on him by Tom Junod for Esquire.

Businessweek & Fast Company Features

There were a few pieces that stood out from recent issues of Businessweek and Fast Company.

The latest BW had two feature stories of note including "A Pet Food Store Fights to Survive Sandy" by Karl Taro Greenfeld. He's one of those writers whose work I look for (along with Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone as other frequent Businessweek contributors) and provides in this piece a thorough and compelling view into the storm aftermath for one wiped out Staten Island business and it's owners.

Also from this issue was the interesting Devin Leonard piece "Is Concierge Medicine the Future of Health Care?" about doctors taking on patients on a monthly fee basis rather than billing insurance carriers for exams and basic services. Very interesting notion with lots of different service derivations and costs ranging from extremely high to quite affordable.

From Fast Company recently a feature that particularly stood out was "IBM's Watson Is Learning Its Way To Saving Lives" by Jon Gertner. Fascinating look at the ever-improving supercomputer (of winning at Jeopardy fame) and it's potential applications in any number of fields including finance and medicine. Interesting in the piece was the description of Watson (with it's computing power coming from software as much as hardware) being positioned for medical diagnosing purposes as a tool providing possibilities and %s of likely success rather than end all be all intelligence. While information from Watson may wind up being better than from a doctor, it could speed adoption of the computer to understate how it might replace a doctor's evaluation.

Two other things of particular interest from Fast Company lately were mention of of a Social Media expert (a nebulous phrase to be sure) and feature story on a well known website and it's founder. The Social Media expert mentioned was Clara Shih and seeing her in the "Leadership in a Time of Chaos" Dec/Jan cover story reminded me of a March 2012 Businessweek piece that referenced her book The Facebook Era. The website and it's founder Fast Company feature was "Not Just Another Web 2.0 Company, Yelp Basks In Its Star Power" by Max Chafkin. I'm fascinated by Social Media companies and how some seem to make much more sense than others... with Jeremy Stoppleman's Yelp appearing to have a lot of staying power.

Fast Company April Issue: Features on Facebook, Tesla Motors & MLB Advanced Media

The April issue of Fast Company had three different features with solid writing on some tremendously interesting companies.

The cover story was "'Boy CEO' Mark Zuckerberg's Two Smartest Projects Were Growing Facebook And Growing Up" by Ellen McGirt and it included some excellent "then to now" material. McGirt wrote of first meeting Zuckerberg and writing the May 2007 Fast Company cover story "Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: Hacker. Dropout. CEO." and how he's since evolved as a leader. Pretty remarkable personal transformation and probably more remarkable progress for the company with Facebook going from 19M to 845M users during that time. McGirt notes as well how Facebook in early 2007 opened up to outside developers... a step which for me brings to mind Apple and the transformative effects of its iTunes store.

Another piece from this issue was similar to McGirt's in that it featured a rock-star stature CEO, in this case Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. "Why Tesla Motors Is Betting On The Model S" was written by Jon Gertner and covers the much anticipated and planned for July launch of its $50,000 sedan. Musk is a fascinating guy and the thing that stood out from this piece was his mention of needing iterations (three progressive car models in his view) to reach his ultimate goal of a low priced mass market vehicle. This translates to the Model S sedan as the mid-point between the high priced roadster that's been out for a while now and the planned for the future third model. With this story told, another similarity between the pieces on Tesla and Facebook comes from how McGirt finished off with mention of a circa-2007 Zuckerberg speaking of this same iteration concept and moving towards an end-state.

Finally, a third feature from the April FC issue didn't share the same parallels as those on the companies of Musk and Zuckerberg, but was very interesting in its own right. Written by Chuck Salter, "MLB Advanced Media's Bob Bowman Is Playing Digital Hardball. And He's Winning" is about the innovative and money-making digital arm of Major League Baseball.

Fast Company Mar 2012 "50 Most Innovative Companies" Issue

There was a bunch of interesting content from the March edition of Fast Company Magazine. It was the annual "50 Most Innovative Companies" issue and below are the businesses and associated writing that stood out (doesn't discount the companies on the full list not noted here, just that I didn't read anything on them that was terribly new to me)...

#5 - Square: There was a fairly lengthy profile of founder Jack Dorsey done by Ellen McGirt. It's well written and interesting content on a fascinating guy (Dorsey also co-founded Twitter) and company doing incredibly well in the fortified barriers to entry financial services industry.

#12 - Southern New Hampshire University: Excellent feature piece done by Anya Kamenetz about online education offerings from the traditional not for profit university.

#13 - Jawbone: Interesting profile from Farhad Manjoo on the consumer electronics maker noted as "one of the hottest private companies in the world."

#19 - Airbnb: Another long piece, this one by Austin Carr, on the successful vacation (but, not exclusively) rental facilitation company. That description sure leaves something to be desired so fortunately the Carr story details well Airbnb and its design-centric focus.

#24 - Starbucks: Featured was an excellent look by Jon Gertner at the company and how its returned to success by focusing less on simple replication expansion and more on performance and innovation. Also of interest from the piece was mention of future growth into the area of health and wellness.

#29 - Red Bull Media House: Red Bull an interesting company in the unconventional way its grown in part through extreme sports affiliation and Teressa Iezzi details in this profile its extension of sports sponsorship to a content division.

#34 - Chipotle: Interesting profile by Danielle Sacks on the fast food company with detail beyond what I've seen about efforts around an organic, sustainable and humane food supply. Mention also made of a Chipotle YouTube video with now 6M views.

#41 - Kickstarter: Probably the shortest piece of those I've highlighted, but still an interesting one by Rachel Arndt on the platform being more and more heavily used for funding creative ventures (noted in the piece that 17 Sundance films used Kickstarter).