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Prior to my first Japan­ese trip, a col­league gave me this sage advice, “In Tokyo, things are what they are…unless they are not” Hav­ing been to the Far East before, the dichotomy of his coun­sel didn’t sur­prise me – after all, if Asia epit­o­mizes dichotomies and Tokyo must be the poster child.

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Inc.com has a nice fea­ture pro­fil­ing 50 (US) com­pa­nies doing inter­est­ing stuff in the green space.

A com­pany called Nanoso­lar seem to have cracked a way to, in effect, “print” solar cells, reduc­ing the cost and offer­ing a more ver­sa­tile alter­na­tive to tra­di­tional panels.

Grist has an inter­est­ing arti­cle, Trans­form­ing the auto­mo­bile about the future of the car and some of the options avail­able and another on how the media is chang­ing its approach to cli­mate change reporting.

Tree­hug­ger fea­tures a new solar pow­ered phone from DoCoMo as well as a link to The Waste Book, a direc­tory of recy­cling busi­nesses.

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So, 0 to 60mph in 4 sec­onds, 130mph top speed and… it’s elec­tric. This is the Tesla Road­ster and I want one.

To me, it looks a bit like a Lotus Elise – which is no bad thing (the site has some nice eye candy on it). It has a 250 mile range which coun­ters one of the real lim­i­ta­tions of pre­vi­ous elec­tric cars. The only prob­lem is that it’s left hand drive… oh, and comes in at about $100k… and it’s sold out any­way. But if it wasn’t for all that…

Here’s some video taken at the launch:

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Tree­hug­ger has an item on IBM’s new green research unit.

From Tree­hug­ger:

The cur­rently unnamed busi­ness unit will focus on ideas that will directly ben­e­fit the envi­ron­ment, develop them, mar­ket them and imple­ment them.

Read the rest here.

(BTW, if any­one involved on this at IBM would like some help from a really good cre­ative agency I know, click here to get in touch.)

A press release from the Clean­tech Ven­ture Net­work has started to place some esti­mates for the VC oppor­tu­nity for clean tech over the next few years. From the release:

…the Clean­tech Ven­ture Net­work® fore­casts that clean­tech ven­ture cap­i­tal invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties for major insti­tu­tional investors glob­ally through 2009 are esti­mated at $17 bil­lion, with $10 bil­lion in North Amer­ica, $5 bil­lion in Europe and $2 bil­lion for the rest of the world.

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There has been a raft of inter­est­ing arti­cles and posts lately look­ing at alter­na­tives to tra­di­tional desktop-based soft­ware. Some, like the peo­ple at Vit­a­min, are look­ing to reduce the cost by mov­ing to a pri­mar­ily open source solu­tion. Oth­ers, like Sam at TechCrunch UK, are explor­ing the web OS approach, tak­ing advan­tage of the plethora of new web-based apps that are spring­ing up (and gen­er­ally being bought by Google). And yet oth­ers are cau­tion­ing that there is a need for both desk­top and web-based soft­ware.

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Faris at Tal­ent imi­tates, genius steals has some thoughts on sell­ing new tech­nolo­gies. He points out how most tech com­pa­nies are in essence run by engi­neers who love tech­nol­ogy for technology’s sake and how this leads to the kind of tech­nob­a­b­ble com­mu­ni­ca­tions that have typ­i­fied the indus­try for so long.

This kind of speeds and feeds approach of course means very lit­tle to those out­side the early adopter com­mu­nity. In mass mar­kets, most people’s eyes sim­ply glaze over when faced by the likes of a “256MB PCI Express ATI RADEON X1300 Pro graph­ics card” or any of the other com­po­nents that make up many of today’s tech prod­ucts.

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The con­clu­sions of the Stern Report are fright­en­ing by anyone’s standards:

• a 2˚C rise in tem­per­a­ture could mean 4 bil­lion peo­ple suf­fer­ing water shortages
• it would mean 40% of species fac­ing extinction
• it could lead to a fur­ther 200 mil­lion peo­ple going hungry
• if we don’t do some­thing very seri­ous, very soon (ie now) cli­mate change could shrink global economies by 20%

And this is just the begin­ning.

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