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“Will Our Plugged-In Planet Have a Green or Black Future?” As originally featured on kansascity.com by Scott Canon

Chances are the Internet has changed something about your life. How you shop. How you stay in touch with school buddies or look for a job.

But has it made you greener? And will using the Internet more change your wear and tear on the planet?

The short answer is that the Internet could save energy, if not necessarily Mother Earth.

The more interesting answer comes in a longer conversation short on absolutes and peppered with unintended consequences.

In Kansas City, perhaps as much as anywhere in America, that discussion could become ever more profound. If Google Inc. succeeds with plans to blanket the market in lightning-fast Internet hookups — its service will make its debut in some neighborhoods this year — the change could be transformational.

We’ll have access at home to Internet fast enough to download the city library’s entire collection every minute. Speeds like that, Google hopes, will mean that we use the Internet more and in so-far-unimagined ways.

Some of that use could help us cut back on energy consumption, though some will surely add to our demand. The results will vary and often defy calculation.

“We don’t see the Internet as some silver bullet, but it will help cut energy use,” said Rob Atkinson, the executive director of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “It can make a difference. It’s just not always clear in what ways.”

Let’s imagine you’ve got an office job. You drive 10 miles to work and 10 miles back. Now let’s outfit your house with Google’s promise of 1-gigabit-per-second Internet speed — bandwidth to burn.

Suddenly you tap not only into email but also your employer’s electronic nerve center. With a far faster Internet, you can have constant high-definition live video feeds with a dozen co-workers constantly. Crystal clear audio and video without a hint of delay. We’ve just eliminated all that gasoline burned on your daily commute.

But wait. You’re going to have the furnace or air conditioner in your home running more during the day. Your lights will be on. Unless your company has loads of teleworkers, there’s probably no energy savings at the office from having you at home. Instead of stopping at the gym on your way to work in the morning and the grocery on your way home, you make special trips.

Still on average, at least one study suggests, only 15 percent of the energy savings we make from eliminating your drive is wiped out by the new household energy costs.

Whether it’s telecommuting or thermostat crowd sourcing, some see the changes as inevitable.

“Whether it happens now or happens in 20 years, it’s going to happen because oil will just become too expensive,” said Matt Bauer, president and co-founder of BetterWorld Telecom, an Internet and phone service provider marketed as socially responsible.

BetterWorld’s Ali Gunertem recently helped out at a fundraiser for earthquake relief for the citizens of Van, Turkey. Generously hosted at the home of the Virginia businessman Terry McAuliffe and coordinated with Turkish Philanthropy Funds, the event raised funds for the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that occurred in eastern Turkey near the city of Van in October, 2011.

The fundraiser was a great success and raised vital funds for the Van community.  Attendees included Turkish Ambassador to Washington Namik Tan, William D. Tuille, Mayor of city of Alexandria, VA,  Lincoln McCurdy, President of the Turkish Coalition of of America Board of Directors, and former House Representative, Richard Gephardt.

As originally featured in SustainableIndustries.com by BetterWorld President Matthew Bauer.

A three part series: Reading the tea leaves, accepting the inevitable and bringing focus to the most promising sector of our economy.

For eons, civilization on Earth evolved slowly, innovation and change took place over decades and centuries, until the past few hundred years. Suddenly, an explosion of invention and progress gave society airplanes, cars, global wars, computers, skyscrapers, the Internet, global movement of goods and money, beauty, opportunity and destruction on a level never imagined. For the first time since we pulled our knuckles off the ground, humanity had gotten way out ahead of itself. So who could blame us for buying into the religion of growth for growth’s sake, materialism, globalization and all the ensuing collateral damage.

As this tsunami of advancement began to hit the shore in various forms, the subsequent growing pileup has awakened many to the realities of the positives and negatives of our two-century epoch. In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus offers Neo a choice between the blue pill or the red pill – blissful ignorance of illusion (blue) or embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality (red). Neo chooses red pill and all the pain of reality that goes with it, but also opens himself up to the beauty of possibility.

Our global, one-size-fits-all economy is becoming increasingly outmoded, and with the red pill now making its way into society’s bloodstream, there’s no turning back. As we begin to awake from our hangover and face the reality of recent years, we feel a pull toward something new and different. All around us there is an undercurrent that is slowly but surely transforming the nature and structure of business. It is driven by a cultural shift that seeks greater connection and creativity, living wage jobs, more sustainable lifestyles, empowerment and ownership, and owes much to our newly installed and exponentially growing biosphere connector – the Internet.

Since we’ve taken the red pill, we need to begin by shifting our thinking. Instead of focusing on the bad news as is de rigueur these days, let’s set our sights on the positive currents of our time.

Change is occurring in so many corners of industry – across varied communities, organizations and diverse verticals – it’s everywhere you look. It is visible in the dynamics around the new Access Economy, the disintermediation occurring in every sector, and the “Buy Local – Be Local” initiatives found from Charleston toSeattle. It can also be seen in the resurgence in local banking and a growing multitude of alternative investment instruments. These changes go hand-in-hand with the new wave of creative knowledge and remote workers enabled by the Internet – our relatively new global biosphere network – where over 10 percent of the world’s population is now on broadband in less than 20 years of commercial Internet growth. The list continues to grow, as entrepreneurs find new and innovative ways around the thousand-car pileup otherwise known as our current national economy.  You can liken it to the recovery in nature, how it organizes itself and rebirths after a forest fire, volcanic eruption, or hurricane.

Kirkpatrick Sale’s seminal work, Human Scale, is now over 30 years old, but has never been more valuable in its application to the many systems that drive America, from transportation to education to business. Sale walks through almost every major human-invented system on the planet, from governments, to schools, communities, businesses and even streetscapes, and concludes that each has a breaking point, and that size does matter.

But in this case, running contrary to the big is beautiful mindset, each system has a breaking point and when that is passed, its effectiveness diminishes proportionately as it grows in size. The big box, global corporation cowboys argue that WalMart is more efficient, for example, than many local farmers serving their goods through local stores. When you add up the underlying data and impacts, the ramifications are, in fact, disastrous for communities, our health, the middle class, and on and on. The result is low-wage jobs, lack of ownership and empowerment, decreased food quality and safety, loss of community dollars and loss of Main Street. The point here is that it does not need to be an absolute, but clearly a rebalancing back towards small business is in order, and is on the way.

Small business accounts for roughly one-third of our economy. Firms with less than 100 people account for 99 percent of the companies in the US, 30 percent of the jobs, and 21 percent of the revenue [see How Important is Small Business to the U.S. infographic for details and sources].

However, the number of startups and small firms relative to the overall percentage of full time jobs has been on the decline over the past 20 years. As our economy has further transitioned from manufacturing to services [see Number of Establishments Gaining Jobschart], jobs have been flowing to firms with over 250 employees [Chart 7].

This phenomenon is proportional to the meteoric rise and over-development of big box stores throughout the 80s, 90s, and 00s – which, in turn, led to the  destruction of many Main Street businesses. We can also look to the latter part of this past decade when, during the economic collapse, funds dried up for small businesses, both startup and continuity/growth capital.

This phenomenon is proportional to the meteoric rise and over-development of big box stores throughout the 80s, 90s, and 00s – which, in turn, led to the  destruction of many Main Street businesses. We can also look to the latter part of this past decade when, during the economic collapse, funds dried up for small businesses, both startup and continuity/growth capital.

From a funding perspective, the average small business has approximately $1.3M in annual revenues, which falls into the lower end of the most inefficient funding category in the US business sector today. For companies in the $1M - $5M range, securing growth capital from either bank or equity funding is next to impossible. Even after signing over every possible asset, the financial bar keeps rising higher. This resulting squeeze is not the fault of Main Street or small businesses, but they are left holding the bag, caught in the double whammy of keeping the doors open and trying not to lay off staff, while being told that regulators have tightened the noose and banks don’t want “questionable” loans on their books.

This leaves the equity players in this category with too few assets for bank loans nowhere to go. These companies want to hire and expand but the access to capital is just not there.  This spotlights the outmoded thinking in our economy, and regulators need to wake up to the fact that we are evolving from an asset-based economy. Loans and lines of credit need to transition from houses, cars, buildings, or machines, to track records, profitability, and management teams. This trend is not going away, so laws and rules need to be adjusted.

On the horizon, though, hope springs eternal with Millenials and Gen Y’ers. A recent Inc. Magazine article, showed that of 872 people aged 18 to 34 surveyed about entrepreneurship, 54 percent said they either want to start a business or have already started one. The entrepreneurial spirit is a common theme that binds America and we need to consciously feed this spirit, adjust our thinking, laws and regulations and bolster the next generation. Think of this as the greatest opportunity for our country to stay competitive in the world. What do we have to lose?

The next part in this series will focus on a selection of facts and trends that all point to a inevitable tipping point where small business emerges to become an organizing principle of the new economy.

Also, startups (which typically begin as small businesses) create a constant and large number of new jobs in the US – new firms add a 3M jobs per year, old firms lose 1M (see Job Growth in U.S.  Driven Entirely by Startups, a study from the Kansas City-based  Kauffman Foundation).

Excerpted from BetterWorld Insights Newsletter.

Happy New Year!

Delancey Street Donation
On behalf of our customers, we’re celebrating this holiday season with a donation to the Delancey Street Foundation. Now in it’s 40th yr., Delancey is a community where people with nowhere to turn, turn their lives around. If every community had a Delancey Street it would truly be a BetterWorld.

BetterWorld Makes 2011 Inc. 500|5000
As 2011 comes to a close, we’d like to send a big shout out to you, our customers, who helped BetterWorld Telecom become the 3,531st fastest growing private company in the U.S.  BetterWorld and the other companies on this year’s list created 350K jobs over the past 3 years, and economic stimulus of 366B.

BetterWorld has teamed up with SalesForce.com to roll out their new industry-leading Customer Service Portal. This new online service center will be available to all BetterWorld customers by the end of the first quarter of 2012.

New Streamline CARE Features Include:

• Submit & Manage Trouble Tickets - Access to online trouble ticket creation and status
• Social Media Options -  Ability to submit tickets and connect with BetterWorld via Twitter
• Contact Info & Services - Ability to update key account data and manage your BetterWorld services

Net Neutrality
A free and open Internet is critical to modern society and business.  However,  large companies that own the highways of the Internet are seeking to centralize and control the content & put up toll booths.  This would follow the same pattern as telephony, movies, radio & TV and other media.  At BetterWorld Telecom, we support a free and open Internet with equal access for all, where innovation can thrive and are taking net neutrality up as one of our causes in 2012. Stay tuned for the first event of the BetterWorld Forum series, which will be held this January in San Francisco.

Telecom for Non-profits
BetterWorld donated 1000’s of phones to non-profits in 2011.  The BetterWorld - TechSoup program offers donations and discounts to U.S. non-profits. Now that’s Telecom for Good.

FishWise Case Study

BetterWorld in the Media
New Video - Our Customers and Partners speak out

BetterWorld featured on The Wendel Forum

“Keep the Internet Free and Open” by BetterWorld Pres in TheHill.com

New Resource Library
Make the most of your BetterWorld voice and data services with our Online Resource Center. From hardware to services, this is your one-stop for all information on BetterWorld Solutions.

Announcing the BetterWorld Bike Team 2012 - Stay tuned for more info & schedule.