Who’s the Greenest of Them All? With Sure Points, You Can Count Your Eco-Friendliness
It’s not easy being green, Kermit the Frog sang. A startup called Sure has a way to make it easier: Give people points for making green lifestyle choices.
The Sure system, which launched today at DEMO Fall 2012, is designed to help individuals, companies, and even whole cities reduce their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. At every level, people get points for making more eco-friendly choices: buying organically-made bread, riding bicycles instead of driving cars, or using compact fluorescent lighting and environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes. And if you get more points, you qualify for discounts on future purchases.
In other words, Sure makes being green into a sort of game. But here’s where it gets interesting: You can gain more Sure points by frequenting businesses or working for companies that have a lot of Sure points, or by living in a city with a lot of Sure points. Conversely, companies get Sure points for having lots of employees with eco-friendly lifestyles, and cities’ scores rise if they have lots of residents who have high scores.
Read more! I highly encourage you to do so….(VentureBeat)
New collaboration with the Dominican University of California and Sustainable Reference
Sustainable Reference is proud to announce a new collaboration with the Dominican University of California’s Green MBA Program’s Marketing Research Methods class!
Dominican University’s Green MBA Program (the first green MBA in the USA) helps students achieve their goals in creating a better world through green business. Their mission: “The Green MBA is an engaging learning community where people with strong environmental and social values develop effective
leadership capacities to advance economically successful, ecologically restorative, and socially just initiatives in any type of organization.”The Marketing Research Methods class “teaches students methods and practices for applied field research to support environmental sustainability in business decision making.”
At Sustainable Reference we believe that the working together between centers of education and startups makes for a perfect win-win situation. Startups have limited budgets and collaborations such as these allows to broaden up the study of specific areas that otherwise would not have been possible until later stages of development. And for students, they also learn more by working with a company and its products that are actually out in the market and already have specific needs, clients, etc. that need to be taken into account, versus working on hypothetical projects that lack these external factors.
Sustainable Reference has been open to teaming up with other education institutions in the past and is open to other opportunities in the future. From previous cooperations, we found that getting to know the students has even allowed us to find talented individuals that ended up forming part of the Sustainable Reference family.
Sustainable Reference is an award winning company that has set as one of its main goals to reduce human induced CO2 emissions by 1% by the end of 2016. The company is currently working on two
Each of these platforms promotes sustainability from a molecular, up to a planetary level. web platforms, SustPro.com and Sure. SustPro.com is a platform for sharing at a global scale sustainable products, services and ideas, that can be implemented in professions (a farmer, an architect, a secretary, a baker, etc.) as well as in our lifestyles. Sure stands for Sustainable Recognition and is the sustainable points exchange platform that allows to know how sustainable products, citizens, companies and cities really are based on their practices, purchases, etc.
Sure will be first announced to the public in Silicon Valley at the Demo conference (the most renowned conference for launching new technologies and trends in the USA) taking place on October 1-3.
SUSTAINABLE REFERENCE WINS THE SPANISH PITCH NIGHT PRESENTING “SURE”!
On Wednesday, July 25, Andy Backer, CEO of Sustainable Reference, participated in the Spanish Pitch Night, an event held at Rocket Space in San Francisco. Spanish Pitch Night was a ompetition between 10 Spanish entrepreneurs, presenting their company’s business plan.
Andy Backer presented SURE!, Sustainable Reference’s point system to encourage positive sustainable activity within people’s work and life, by awarding recognition and incentives to sustainable behavior. SURE! is an interactive, fun and a transparent online platform that helps pave the way towards a sustainable future. This idea won over the judges landing SURE! with a first prize.
Each contestant only had precisely three minutes to make the pitch, and two minutes for a question and answer forum following the pitch. The judges were pitching expert Angelika Blendstrup, and Spanish Investor Marcel Prunera. Ten companies participated in the competition, four of which take part in the Spain Tech Center program: Bevalley, Toolea, Mobadme and Sustainable Reference. Also included were four companies from the Spanish program, Imagine. And Yuzz, a Spanish contest for young entrepreneurs, had two representatives compete.
This first place represents the second award for SURE! in less than a week. The company was declared a finalist, with a special mention, in the 2nd Green ICT Application Challenge, a contest seeking out sustainable solutions that address global warming. Among three other companies, SURE! will be given an award which will take place in Paris, France, on September 19, 2012.
ANDY BACKER, FINALIST OF THE 2ND GREEN ICT APPLICATION CHALLENGE
The profesor of IE School of Architecture, Andy Bäcker is a finalist with a special mention in the 2nd Green ICT Application Challenge, organized by UIT and Telefónica, in support of “International year for Sustainable Energy for All”.
Read more (IE University)…
SUSTPRO in The CleanTech Mixer. Startups envisioning a cleaner, more sustainable future.
Each month we imagine the future through the lens of a different industry by inviting 15 startups to showcase their product and vision. Themes we’ve highlighted range from CleanTech and Gaming to The Future of the City. Don’t get left out of the conversation between hundreds of founders, VCs, startups, journalists and industry professionals.
IE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR ANDY BÄCKER STARTUP COMPANY SELECTED AS A RED HERRING TOP 100 EUROPE TECH STARTUP
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Red Herring announced its Top 100 award in recognition of the leading private companies from Europe, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries.
Red Herring’s Top 100 Europe list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work.
Among these companies, Professor Andy Bäcker’s company, Sustainable Reference, was included in the list.
“Chosing the companies with the strongest potential was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across Europe to the Top 100 Winners. We believe Sustainable Reference embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. Sustainable Reference should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was very strong.”
Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their sector peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in Europe.
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