Friday, June 20, 2008

Lighting Up Rural India - Forbes.com

Below is an article Forbes published about D.Light Design. I had the good fortune of finding Sam and Ned last year. D.Light goes to show that, with a strong management team and a sound business model, businesses can simultaneously unlock social and financial value at the BoP.

Lighting Up Rural India - Forbes.com: "Some 1.6 billion people around the world live without access to regular electricity. A start-up company founded by some ambitious recent graduates of Stanford Business School aims to ease that problem--and make a profit at the same time.

The company, d.light design based in New Delhi, India, has developed a trio of lights created for a market it calls the 'base of the pyramid'--including people who live on the equivalent of $1 a day. Its portable Nova light, which it is debuting on Monday, has a high-powered LED that d.light claims can run for 40 hours on a full charge. It comes with a solar panel, so recharging costs nothing. The Nova also works on an AC charger. D.light plans to sell the light for $15 to $30; the higher price includes both the solar charging panel and the AC charger.

Many people in India and Africa without electricity currently use kerosene lanterns as a light source. But kerosene emits unhealthy fumes, is an extremely dim light and far too often ends up burning people or homes in accidents.

'People leave the kerosene lantern on low all night long as a kind of night light, and they wake up and cough black soot,' explains d.light design President Ned Tozun. 'Our mission is to eradicate the use of kerosene.'

This isn't the only project to try to bring alternative power to"

Ocean temperatures and sea level increases 50 percent higher than earlier predictions

Ocean temperatures and sea level increases 50 percent higher than earlier predictions: "New research suggests that ocean temperature and associated sea level increases between 1961 and 2003 were 50 percent larger than estimated in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The results are reported in the June 19 edition of the journal Nature. An international team of researchers, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory climate scientist Peter Gleckler, compared climate models with improved observations that show sea levels rose by 1.5 millimeters per year in the period from 1961-2003. That equates to an approximately 2½-inch increase in ocean levels in a 42-year span."

Thursday, June 05, 2008

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: "Plummeting currencies did in the first Asian economic miracle. The second may fall victim to surging inflation.

Central banks from Beijing to Bangkok are losing their bets that a global slowdown would temper price increases. While export demand from the U.S. and Europe may have eased, it has been replaced by rising domestic consumption that has helped push inflation rates in Asia as high as 26 percent.

The result: In China, Thailand, the Philippines and at least eight other Asian economies, benchmark borrowing costs are lower than the rate of inflation, resulting in negative real interest rates, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The risk is that prices will spiral even faster, leading to overheated economies and an eventual bust."