Environmentally friendly homes can reduce inhabitants’ carbon footprints, save resources and lead the way for others to live the same way. Most of us, however, have been living in homes that are pretty standard, in that they don’t help us reduce our carbon footprints. The US Department of Energy has been trying to further green living in terms of homes and has been organizing the Solar Decathlon for a while now. The international competition is a biennial event that challenges 20 college teams to come up with conceptual homes that utilize solar energy. The teams get to work on site, detailing their prefabricated houses for 10 days in a bid to take home the Solar Decathlon title. 2012’s competition is set to begin and we’re eager to see who wins the coveted prize.
Italy and France have joined forces to create the “Astonyshine” 100 percent solar home concept as part of the 2012 Solar Decathlon Europe. The international competition is open to universities from around the globe and promotes research into the development of efficient housing. Astonyshine is a modern reinterpretation of the classic Mediterranean villa, and is the result of the combined efforts from Polytechnic of Bari (Italy), University of Ferrara (Italy), Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais (France) and Ecole des Ponts ParisTech (France).
A Swedish firm myFC has created an instant mobile charger, dubbed the PowerTrekk, which makes use of water to produce power for your smartphones. PowerTrekk mixes water with a chemical powder called sodium silicide to generate hydrogen gas that can power your cells through the fuel cell technology. The PowerTrekk was put on display at CES 2012.
Sindh Governor Dr Ishratul Ebad Khan said that the government had devised a plan to generate 10,000 megawatts of electricity from Thar coal by 2020.
The federal government had been approached for laying a transmission line to take the electricity from Thar field to the national grid, he said while presiding over a meeting on Thar coal at the Governor’s House Thursday. He said installation of transmission network is the integral part of the plan which should be ready by the time power projects are ready to generate electricity from Thar coal.
The Governor pointed out that Thar coal would be utilised to make Pakistan self-sufficient in power generation to strengthen economy and make this area the hub of the petro-chemical industry.
Over the course of 2011, we witnessed social media and location-based services really take off for small businesses — the mom and pop shops of the world continued to get more digital and more mobile.
As this year wraps up, we look back at the technological advancements that small businesses have benefited from and predict how those technologies will affect entrepreneurs in 2012.
We spoke with a number of small businesses to get their thoughts on how the market will continue to adapt to changing technologies as we move into the new year.