You won’t believe it. If you founded a company, then, you secretly invent a revolutionary green product that makes everyone gasp for air.  Yes, that would be staggering.

Now, take it to another level.  You’re not ready to show your cards, your hand, your invention, and your staff spills the news to 60 minutes on CBS. You won’t believe that a box you hold in your hand can power a Wal-Mart.

The MountainView pioneer of Bloomberg Box, is  Sridhar, and he’s going public with his product  now? Turns out it wasn’t his idea – his customers are forcing him to show his hand. “They are pushing,” he admits. “They are saying if you’re not going to say anything we’re going to go out and say we’re doing this.”

Check out the video from CBS. It was pretty cool.

Click it to watch the video of Bloomberg Box Innovation

The global warming industry is imploding from scientific scandals, inconvenient weather, economic anxiety and surging popular skepticism (according to a Pew Research Center survey released in January, global warming ranks 21st out of 21 in terms of the public’s priorities).

I guess a 21st ranking is enough for Audi to spend a million + bucks to persuade you during the SuperBowl

The moral of the story is that we should welcome our new green tyrants and, if we know what’s good for us, surrender to the New Green Order.

Audi’s “Green Police” depicts an America where citizens are arrested — roughly — for even minor environmental infractions. A man at the supermarket asks for a plastic shopping bag and has his head slammed against the counter as he’s cuffed by a Green Police officer. “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy,” quips the cop. When officers find a battery in the wrong suburban garbage bin, one big cop yells, “Battery! Let’s go! Take the house!”

Some eco-bloggers disliked the ad because it reinforces the association of undemocratic statism or PC bullying with environmentalism. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times dubbed it “misguided.”

Meanwhile, some conservatives didn’t like it because it makes light of what they believe is actually happening. After all, in America and Europe, the list of environmental crimes is growing at an almost exponential rate. The ad is absurd, of course, but not nearly as absurd as Audi thinks.

What was Audi’s intent? Presumably, to sell cars.

“The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police,” writes Grist magazine’s David Roberts on the Huffington Post. The target audience, according to Roberts, are men who want to “do the right thing.” He’s certainly right that the ad isn’t aimed at people (whom he childishly mocks as “teabaggers”) who worry that their liberties are being slowly eroded.

These ATM machines accept stacks of up to 50 cash bills of various denominations or a stack of up to 30 checks. The machines take an image of the bills and checks and immediately provide the check images to the user.

No envelopes or deposit slips are required for the deposits, and so far companywide the ATMs already have saved about 460 tons of paper or 8,331 trees.

I’m talking about Wachovia Bank, bought by Wells Fargo in 2008,  going “green” starting with 12 bank locations in Georgia.

I used to be surprised to hear GREEN NEWS from our southern folk friends, well, not anymore. Even Chattanooga is considered one of the greenest small towns in America and can prove it with the first Green LEED Certified Movie Theater.

Installation of the ATMs is expected to go nationwide rapidly.

The banks and gas stations need to also stop criminals from swiping our ATM card numbers. The hackers are like inmates and sometimes it feels like they’ve taken over the jail!

Just last week, a friend of mine went to use the local Chase ATM to get some cash money. When he walked up to the ATM something struck him as funny.

If you had a couple drinks you may not notice

He told me, “I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but the card reader didn’t look right, like it wasn’t completely attached. I grabbed and pulled at the card reader and, lo and behold, it came off! It was actually a card skimmer attached to the ATM over that actual card reader. On the back there is a battery,  flash memory card, and a mini USB port it was set up so that ATM cards would first go through the skimmer and then into the ATM itself so you’d never know the difference.

Fortunately I’d seen a news story about this sort of thing a couple of years back and have been paranoid ever since.”

If the card reader on an ATM seems like it doesn’t belong—and especially if it looks fragile or misaligned—go to another ATM. And let someone at that bank or store know that they may want to double-check their ATM for skimmers.

these are attached to ATM's everyday. BEWARE

My gut says, that the companies born in this recession will be the stuff of legend by the end of the decade.  Here’s 5 trends for small business I see coming at us like a storm on doppler radar.

5. Mastering (note: the word “mastering”, not just tapping into) social media is one of the hottest of all online trends.

I thought “Sex” was the most searched term online in 2009. NOT! Facebook” in fact was the most searched term in 2009. (Source: Experian Hitwise)

Big business has discovered what many small businesses already know: Facebook is a great place to advertise.

Hop on the social media train, Jane, because it’s headed out of the station at light speed.

4. Going Local in a green farmers market sort of way: Consumers are increasingly looking for a local angle when looking where to spend their hard-earned dollar.

Example: The explosion of farmers markets across the country. According to Entrepreneur, “there are almost 5,000 farmers markets across the country, the result of more than 5% annual growth for the past five years.”

Additionally, with people staying closer to home right now and with the green ethos growing, home is where the heart (and dollar) is.

3. Sharing vs. Shared Experiences: We are all not watching or experiencing the same thing nearly as much.

For the small business person, it is vital to realize that 1) people look for, and increasingly expect, the personal, and 2) small, localized, immediate user-created media are where the eyeballs are headed.

2. Mobile marketing is exploding. Whether it is creating the Next Big App, offering customers a real-time mobile coupon, or creating a text marketing campaign, in 2010 there will be mobile options galore for small business.

It is a new world indeed.

1. The Start-Up Economy:

The outlook is both brighter and calmer. It is calmer because things are slowly getting back to, if not normal, at least something recognizable. And it is brighter because out of the rubble, a new, vital, innovative start-up economy is being born.

We have entered the era of small business. Whereas GM president Charles Wilson once said “What’s good for the country is good for GM, and vice versa,” it can now safely be said that what is good for small business is good for the country. Consider these statistics.

Small businesses now

• Number almost 30 million
• Employ more than half of all workers
• Constitute 99.7% of all employers
• Constitute 97% of all exporters
• Create the majority of business innovations
(Source: U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, 2009)

With 10% unemployment for as far as the eye can see, with the unemployed running out of benefits, and with benefits not what they once were for the employed, start-ups of all shapes and sizes are taking root: One person shops, green home-based businesses, part-time ventures, online enterprises, high tech companies – you name it. These are the folks who, with their creative energy, drive, ingenuity, and hard work will be leading us out of this anything but great recession.

When you get pneumonia or a really bad bug do you change anything in your less than green life? When I checked myself into Emergency a few days ago, the M.D.  diagnosed me with pneumonia and then went holistic on me by sending me to a Compound Pharmacy. I thought I was visiting a doctor, not a naturapathic holistic nutritionist.

I’m not judging anything yet, until I try for more than a week, what he recommended, including probiotics, lots of vitamin D, fish oils and Alkaline water to cure my burping problems. The pricey water tastes better than tap until you get on the internet where experts rip it big time.   

Here’s one Doctor’s opinion with quite the notariety.

“Taking calcium supplements or drinking alkaline water will not change the pH of your blood. If you hear someone say that your body is too acidic and you should use their product to make it more alkaline, you would be wise not to believe anything else the person tells you.”

He continues with “no foods change the acidity of anything in your body except your urine. Your stomach is so acidic that no food can change its acidity. Citrus fruits, vinegar, and vitamins such as ascorbic acid or folic acid do not change the acidity of your stomach or your bloodstream. An entire bottle of calcium pills or antacids would not change the acidity of your stomach for more than a few minutes.”

Mayo Clinic tells us…

“Alkaline water has a higher pH level than normal tap water. Some proponents say that alkaline water can neutralize acid in your bloodstream, boost your energy level and metabolism, and help your body absorb nutrients more effectively. Others say that alkaline water can help you resist disease and slow the aging process. However, there’s no scientific proof that any of these claims are true. For most people, plain water is best.”

What do you believe about Alkaline water?

We know our tap water provides us with safe levels of toxins, so any improvement with filtering is a smart green choice.

We know PLASTIC bottled water, like “Fiji”, which is supposedly “carbon-negative,” and the Lexus of PLASTIC bottled spring waters can’t be that good for us.

According to the company’s website, this product is carbon-negative - implying the planet would actually be worse off without it - for numerous reasons.

Starting in 2010, for instance, Fiji “will require 25% fewer emissions to produce and deliver; 50% of our energy will come from renewable sources like wind, to power their bottling facility in Fiji and biodiesel to replace traditional fuels used in transportation.”

The company is also investing in “forest carbon (e.g., reforestation) and renewable energy projects that prevent the release of carbon into the atmosphere; these add up to at least 120% of our remaining product lifecycle emissions.”

While carbon-offsets are a great way to make up for green sins, the fact remains that shipping water across the world in plastic bottles is far from environmentally sound. Tap water in a reusable stainless steel bottle is still a far better option.

I think the Fiji water thing is a joke. It’s a textbook example of using one so-called green aspect of a product as marketing tactic. I could maybe see this making sense if they were shipping it to countries that don’t have drinking water readily available, but we’ve got lots of water in America. At least for now.