It's The Age Of Stupid, stupid

The Age of Stupid Global Trailer w/Spanish Subtitles from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Went last night to see The Age Of Stupid, actually a very well-made and powerful film. Biggest simultaneous screening of any film ever, etc. etc. Very impressive what they've done with practically no money, strong beliefs and good organisation - chapeau.

It's probably an important film, as was An Inconvenient Truth, and it will probably stir people to action to do something in advance of the Copenhagen summit - good. In fact, 90% of what it says is pretty much correct, it's just a shame it can't resist the temptation, Michael Moore-style, to sound off about whatever other perceived injustices (like the war in Iraq) are against Franny Armstrong's personal beliefs.

If one part particularly rang true for me, it was the comment by an environmental scientist that humans had never before had to deal with a slow-moving iceberg of a problem like climate change, we were evolutionarily equipped to deal with wild animals, warring tribes, etc. - immediate threats. We had no experience of dealing with something like this. The unspoken corrollary is that we tend to vacillate, panic and achieve very little, as we can show over the last 10 years or so.

Anyway, it certainly shows that the issue of Climate Change is by no means far from people's minds, indeed if anything it's resurging. Good - and not just for Barcelona Green.

Wow...didn't expect that...

As a coda to The Good Entrepreneur competition, we now have a paragraph on their site from TGE's Steve Sedgwick (he's one of CNBC's main presenters, I think) about our entry:

"Rob Marchant - Climate Change Retail

Well put together. Combining the need to educate and push the roll-out of proven green, energy saving products. I think the idea will be a great success but my concern surrounds the basic concept of a retail format. Having physical retail stores rather than perhaps a dedicated online offering as a standalone still requires a physical footfall and hence increased energy consumption from store set up to transport to and from the store."

Well that's quite complimentary, really. I'm delighted.

Responding to Steve's concern, the obvious answer is that we would LOVE to do an online-only shop, if ONLY people would buy from it. But there are already plenty, and they don't.

It's a shame, while I understand entirely that your carbon footprint is higher in retail, you have to deal with the way people are now, not the way you would like them to be. Educate first, move them to online purchase later. The key thing is to change their domestic habits, whatever it takes to get there.

Funding starts here!

Well, the Good Entrepreneur competition gained us over 1400 pitch video views (the most of all entries in the competition), pretty much constantly in the top 10 pitches, and a great deal of profile-raising, so we're delighted. Now the real business of getting funded starts in earnest - going well so far, we already have pitch meetings booked. Watch this space...

Finally - a computer that works!

Am now back fully online, after all sorts of problems with computers when I came back from holiday. Thanks, HP, for selling me a computer which takes me 3 days to recover from a hard disk crash...

And how have things been going in the meantime? Well, it seems that the site has settled down a bit, entrants are no longer accusing each other of dastardly deeds and they are rightly focusing on the competition and discussing real issues rather than complaining about the rules, CNBC and each other's entries.

We're a respectable no.5 as I write and still the most viewed video on The Good Entrepreneur. But there are still 9 days to go for shortlisting and the competition is pretty hot, there is now an incredible number of entries (now stabilised at 194). No-one I'm sure expected that many (ok Luis you predicted a last-minute rush, I know, I know).

Anyway, think we have marketed the entry pretty well - apart from friends and family, it's all over LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Preparations for finishing touches to business plans in motion as we head for the 21st August deadline...

3 weeks to go till shortlisting

Then I guess we'll know if we're in or out. But whatever, we're still in a good position for getting funding I reckon. By the way, boy what a bunch of strange people we've got posting their conspiracy theories on our entry right now. According to our research they seem to share common connections (like country of origin) even though they think we don't know this. Weird.

Entries close

Wow, what an incredible number of entries came in at the last minute yesterday (entries are now closed). A staggering 137 entries, assuming there are no more waiting to be put up on the site. We expected a lot less because things were so slow at first (see below posts, we reckoned 50!) But hey, we're ready for the challenge! We are also still doing ok on the popularity board, mostly but not always somewhere in the top 3, which is great. A bunch of entries seem to have just stopped posting, especially those which have been up for a while, which is strange - I would have expected everyone to be active.

Anyway the shortlist will now be announced 21 August, so there are 3 more weeks left on the discussion boards before we can stop looking at them every day to see what's been posted.

Well, we shan't waste this extra time - to work!

Oh yes, and somebody accused me yesterday in a post on our entry of wanting to have a monopoly of the market for these goods and "If you really want to see where your idea is heading, go to North Korea or watch/read George Orwell’s 1984". Incredible but true. Actually I was delighted she seemed to think we would be so successful...

1000 video views on The Good Entrepreneur

Yup, we got there this morning. And we are no.2 in the charts. That's fine, the key thing now is to prepare for the next few weeks to make sure our plans are watertight.


I'm in London this week, and have just seen some energy-efficiency products being sold in a large, out-of-town hardware store (B&Q), which got my attention (see dodgy picture taken on mobile, left).

However, they're being sold just like Home Depot do in the States, i.e. not all in one place and just a fraction of what the store stocks. How do they expect people to engage with these products when they're sold like that? There's still no-one doing what we're suggesting, even in the UK which is ahead of Spain on these things.

Good.

Oh yes, and the competition dates have slipped a bit, now not announcing finalists till September. I guess this gives us more time to polish everything...