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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.

With 33 mil­lion (give or take) souls in one metro area, it ain’t sur­pris­ing there is an excep­tion to every rule. The ultra-modern sky­scraper next to the cen­tur­ies old Shinto shrine, the con­ser­vat­ive, com­posed work col­league who trans­forms into a col­lege kid on Spring Break after a few drinks, the effi­ciency of Shin­juku sub­way sta­tion with 3 mil­lion daily trav­el­ers to the chaos of Tsukiji Fish Mar­ket; Tokyo is home to them all. And it was here that Steven Elli­ott and I traveled in late Octo­ber to meet with our col­leagues from Dentsu Y&R.

The Banner/Dentsu rela­tion­ship is quite young and is based on ser­vi­cing our Hita­chi DMG cli­ent. With Banner’s strong European tech­no­logy cre­den­tials and Dentsu’s impress­ive repu­ta­tion in Japan, the com­bin­a­tion was a nat­ural part­ner­ship to ser­vice Hitachi’s European busi­ness. The Japan trip was to build on the grow­ing rela­tion­ship between the two agen­cies and to begin craft­ing the next evol­u­tion of the “Best Kept Secret” cam­paign we launched in May 2006.

In short, the trip was a run­away suc­cess. Noth­ing com­pares to a real live indoc­trin­a­tion into the Japan­ese obses­sion with tech­no­logy and design. As a 30-something male, you try res­ist an eight-storey build­ing ded­ic­ated solely to all man­ner of elec­tronic gad­gets. Couple that with a city that actu­ally has annual robot shows. Steve and I missed a robot con­fer­ence by a few days where the high­light was a race between a robot that can run and one that can ride a bike! If you want to get tech­no­logy – espe­cially in the con­sumer space – noth­ing beats Tokyo.

We also benefited immensely from the coun­sel of our Dentsu col­leagues who took great pride in ensur­ing we under­stood the nuances and sens­ib­il­it­ies of Japan­ese aes­thet­ics and design. All key inputs as the Banner/Dentsu team attempt to develop a unique brand voice for Hita­chi. It has cer­tainly been an inter­est­ing chal­lenge for us to develop a cam­paign that recog­nizes Hitachi’s ped­i­gree in the elec­tron­ics cat­egory whilst cel­eb­rat­ing its unique Japan­ese her­it­age. You can just ima­gine the pas­sion­ate debates that ensue…

Ulti­mately, as Ban­ner deep­ens its rela­tion­ship with Hita­chi and Dentsu, we will con­tinue to grow our expert­ise in one of technology’s most unique and vibrant mar­kets – Asia. With part­ners and cli­ents like these, we’re look­ing for­ward to for­ging fur­ther part­ner­ships and friend­ships in the region. One’s, ideally, that will unearth some inter­est­ing oppor­tun­it­ies. What an excit­ing jour­ney that prom­ises to be!

See our Tokyo Flickr slideshow here.

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.

Sources: Inc.com, Cor­por­ate Knights, Grist, Tree­hug­ger

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:

So if you see Santa…

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.

Although, all these kinds of fore­casts must be taken with a pinch of salt, Cleantech Ven­ture Net­work has pre­vi­ously shown that in Q3 2006 alone $933 mil­lion was inves­ted in clean tech – so the fig­ures don’t appear too far fetched. The cur­rent release goes on to claim that this invest­ment could deliver 500,000 new jobs and $85 bil­lion in related eco­nomic growth.

As the Stern report in the UK has shown, purely on a prag­matic, eco­nomic level the costs of inactiv­ity are far more ser­i­ous than those of get­ting to grips with the prob­lem. I guess ulti­mately it will be these hard dol­lar factors that will determ­ine whether the will and com­mit­ment can be mustered by industry. While this may be sad for those of a more altru­istic bent, this one is surely a case of whatever gets the result.

Source: Triple Pun­dit

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.

At the moment, I struggle with the case for the purely web-based approach. As much as I like it on a philo­soph­ical level, I know that the one time I need to access a cer­tain file will be the one time I don’t have net­work access. Until there is some degree of ubi­quit­ous WiFi/WiMax option I simply would not have the con­fid­ence to go down this route.

On the desktop, there is a grow­ing (and very wel­come) trend to more stripped back, more eleg­ant soft­ware. My own pref­er­ence is for the kind of applic­a­tions that do one thing very well (and which play nice with oth­ers). Applic­a­tions without the 700 fea­tures that I don’t need (but with access to plug ins for addi­tional, spe­cific tasks I do need). And as I use mul­tiple machines, I need them to share inform­a­tion eas­ily and reliably.

At the moment this means bolt­ing together a mish-mash of online and off­line applic­a­tions. I’ve struggled in vain to find a good know­ledge repos­it­ory (I’ve tried the MORIs, Devon­Thinks and a wide vari­ety of wikis). My favour­ite so far, is StikiPad but, of course, there is no off­line option). Social book­mark­ing has been a boon and I’ve star­ted to use Flock for brows­ing because it integ­rates dir­ectly with my del.icio.us account (it is also pretty slow and a bit buggy but shows great poten­tial). And while RSS is now built in to many browsers, I have been com­pletely seduced by the eleg­ance of News­Fire.

The great hope in all this for me is for applic­a­tions that can work off­line or off­line as needed. Apps that won’t leave me stran­ded when I don’t have web access but which exploit all the bene­fits Web 2.0 offers when I do. I can cer­tainly see why every­one is pour­ing praise on the forth­com­ing Scrybe and can’t wait to try it out.

I don’t believe we will be abandon­ing our oper­at­ing sys­tems any­time soon (‘soon’ being a rel­at­ive term in inter­net time). But if Microsoft crack the online part of their Live ser­vices or Google crack the off­line part of theirs or, indeed if someone like Scrybe or 37signals man­ages to solve the whole thing more eleg­antly, they could elim­in­ate one of the major head­aches know­ledge work­ers have today. Can’t wait.

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.

Per­son­ally, I think much of the industry has moved on from this approach (with dif­fer­ing levels of suc­cess). With many of the fea­tures reach­ing near par­ity and an influx of mar­ket­ing tal­ent, the pitch has moved on from the “my Dad’s big­ger than your Dad” con­tests of old. It’s no longer about who’s got the most giga­bytes, dots per inch or max­imum write speed. Today, in the mass mar­ket, it’s about who cap­tures the imagination.

The thing about really new tech­no­logy is that, for the most part, cus­tom­ers have no pre­vi­ous exper­i­ence of it to base their judge­ments on. This is why many tech com­pan­ies get so frus­trated with research that either fails to ‘give them the answer’ or that spec­tac­u­larly fails to pre­dict cus­tomer reac­tions to new products in the real world.

In Faris’s Wii example, while most people under­stand the concept of a games con­sole the idea of motion sens­it­ive con­trol­lers is new. Nin­tendo looks to get round this by giv­ing the viewer a vicari­ous exper­i­ence of the Wii product. The issue for me in this example is that it feels a bit too sterile. The people on the whole are too styled, the rooms too set-like. And, for the most part, the exper­i­ence they con­vey is (for me) under­whelm­ing. If I put myself in their places, I come away with “that’s inter­est­ing” rather than “I must have one!”

Con­trast this with the Play­sta­tion Double Life ad:

Now that engages the ima­gin­a­tion. Yes, it’s of its time and I don’t think the same approach would work quite so well now. But it brought the product to life, cre­ated empathy with exist­ing gamers and aspir­a­tion with non-gamers.

The real chal­lenge in selling new tech­no­logy is to give cus­tom­ers a com­pel­ling pic­ture of their future lives (at work or play), one that is both inspir­a­tional and grounded.

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.

The cata­logue of dooms­day pre­dic­tions goes on and on (and is noth­ing new). In some ways this is part of the prob­lem – while it’s para­mount to con­vey the urgency of the situ­ation but at the same time many people feel over­whelmed. There’s a learned help­less­ness creep­ing in. Vox pop sur­veys routinely return com­ments to the effect of “What does it mat­ter whether I recycle, it’s just a drop in the ocean…”

There are, of course, no easy answers. An effect­ive response must be hol­istic and global. One part (although cer­tainly not the whole) is tech­no­logy. “Clean tech­no­logy” offers increas­ing options to mit­ig­ate some of the prob­lems and poten­tially elim­in­ate oth­ers. And with the pace of change, it has to be one of the most excit­ing areas in tech­no­logy at this moment.

It also provides some of the most chal­len­ging tasks for mar­keters. All too often mar­ket­ing and com­mu­nic­a­tions are char­ac­ter­ised as the ‘fluffy’ end of busi­ness that spins empty prom­ises and half truths for a fast buck. Well, here is the chance to bury that accus­a­tion once and for all.

Clean tech adop­tion is about chan­ging beha­viour (whether at con­sumer, busi­ness or gov­ern­ment level). This is what tal­en­ted mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als do best. All too often the lan­guage of cli­mate change is the lan­guage of aca­demic or polit­ical debate (of the worst kind). It quickly des­cends into hair-splitting and plaus­ible deni­ab­il­ity. What a great way to dis­en­gage people.

What’s needed is a lan­guage of hope and pos­sib­il­ity. One that coun­ters help­less­ness and offers a vis­ion for the future that brings the issue alive, stirs people into action and, yes, cre­ates prof­it­able busi­nesses for the clean tech industry.

To me, this sounds like the kind of thing many in our industry were born to do.