Do you Poken?

It sounds like a silly card game you played in middle school, but it’s actually the slogan for a new tiny networking tool.

A Poken is a small USB device with an animal shaped cover that stores your personal contact information and allows you to swap your information with another Poken owner.  The Poken make their connections and swap data through when you touch their small four fingered hands together.

Essentially, it’s a paperless business card exchange that allows you to network effectively, while also saving the trees.

After you’ve gathered a bunch of new contacts, you can log on to Poken’s website and upload all the names and addresses. You can then organize, save and export the file to wherever you’d like.

The Suiss- based Poken started in Europe and Japan and is now trying to make it’s United States debut.  The little gadgets cost about $20, which is a pretty fair deal considering the money you’d save on business card printing prices, and come in all different shapes and characters.

This device would be excellent for large conferences and business expos where there is tons of networking and business card swapping. But when I think of all the business men who could benefit from this, I just can’t picture them whipping out a small Poken panda and high-fiving their new friend’s bumble bee. The company might do well to give the gadgets a slightly more business feel. Colored squares or letters would work just fine.

Of course, the tough part will be getting enough people to buy a Poken even though they can’t use it until the device goes mainstream; Which is why the Poken site encourages people to pool together and buy Poken in packs of 12.

Despite the obvious bumps in the road for Poken, the idea is quite fantastic and could really change the way we connect with new people.  Now, instead of limiting a connection to just in-person or just online, people can merge the two instantly.

It’s a great digital Rolodex that makes meeting new people easy and efficient, not to mention environmentally friendly.

For more information, check out this video from MarketWatch

The new iPod nano with FM radio

Apple had their now-annual Rock and Roll event yesterday to premier some of the new products and software they’ve been cooking up in California.

Steve Jobs (he’s back!) talked a great deal about the iPod touch. Who can blame him? Apple has sold over 20 million of them! But the little gadget I was the most excited to see was the new iPod nano.

Apple’s added some great new features to it.  Most notably, a video camera.  My first thought was that a video camera would be a little useless when you have a digital camera that takes videos. But when you compare the size of the two, it’s no competition. The nano is much thinner and more portable.

Of course, my personal favorite feature is the new FM radio. I’m so glad to see this included. As someone who uses the radio frequently, I had all but resigned myself to listening only in the car or at home. Portable radios are just hard to come by these days! They are great for finding new music, listening to your favorite shows and, most importantly, are fantastic for listening to the big game if you’re nowhere near a TV.

The radio displays the name of the station and song and comes with an awesome “tagging” feature that lets you mark songs you hear and like, and keeps a running list in a notes section.  As someone who carries around a small notebook so I can write song names down, this is probably the coolest thing I’ve heard of in a while. It’s the one feature that might actually convince me to upgrade my first generation iPod mini…yes, I still have one of those.

Best of all, they’ve paid attention to environmental aspects in the new nano too.  Apple used arsenic-free glass and made it highly recyclable. The new nano will also be BFR, Mercury and PVC-free.

Since this is the first iPod that may have convinced me to retire my old turquoise work horse,  I have to recommend it highly.


Check out the new commercial here:

The internet is a-buzz over the latest Apple rumor leak that apparently came a day too early.

In a now-removed article on Skynews, Yoko Ono apparently announced that the whole of the Beatles back catalog will be made available to buy on iTunes.

The breaking news came late this afternoon one day before Apple’s annual Rock and Roll event. The event is held to announce new devices and Apple updates.

There have been predictions and rumors over what kind of announcements Apple plans to make tomorrow. Many blogs predict the premier of iPods with cameras and changes to iTunes.

The bigger predictions include the announcement of the Apple tablet and the release of the Beatles catalog. However, most blogs dismissed both as rumors and concluded the announcement as unlikely. That is, until Yoko Ono let the cat out of the bag.
Since the Skynews article has been removed, there is no telling if the story has any truth. Apple could have asked that they remove it, or it could have been proved false.

So it looks like we’re back where we started, a bunch of rumors. But it’s really excited to see that Beatles rumor back on! It definitely makes the event much more exciting since most of the other announcements about iTunes updates and new iPods seem pretty standard and boring. Honestly, a new iPod comes out annually so announcing it is like saying Christmas is coming again this year.

Many websites and blogs will be reporting live at the event, so it looks like we will have to wait and see!

Did you know that Amazon.com has a green store?

I didn’t! And when I was recently browsing the internet for energy efficient televisions and gadgets, I stumbled across their green page. It’s fantastic!

All the green products they can offer are in one place, making shopping easy and quick. It can be a great place to buy products directly from Amazon.com or you can use the page to research which products to buy on your next shopping trip.

Here at YouRenew, we particularly like the green electronics page. All of the devices in their green electronics section have been awarded the Energy Star seal of efficiency. Personally, I would have liked to see more stringent standards, like an EPEAT rating in addition to the Energy Star seal. But, I’m glad Amazon has gotten customers thinking about buying consciously.

Looking at the Amazon page got me thinking, what’s better for the planet? Buying electronics online or buying them in the store?
Surely, the energy spent to ship the item would be more than driving 10 minutes to a local mall? Right?

To answer my question, I found an article from TreeHugger that examines this very issue. The conclusion: “it depends on the variables.”

“According to the Center for Energy & Climate Solutions, shipping two 20 pound packages by overnight air — the most energy-intensive delivery mode — still uses 40 percent less fuel than driving 20 miles round-trip to the mall or store or wherever you’re going,” said TreeHugger “Ground shipping — which is much more efficient than overnight air — checks in at just one-tenth the energy used driving yourself.”

However, TreeHugger notes that shopping online results in 2.5 times more packaging than shopping in stores. In addition, if you don’t need to drive to the store or live in an urban area, it may make more sense to walk to a store and buy the device yourself.

Either way, it’s good to weigh the pros and cons of each purchasing outlet before buying an item. If you live in a suburban area and would need to drive more than 8 miles to pick up the device, shopping online is your best bet. Alternatively, if you live close to the store, taking a walk, bike ride or public transit to the store is a better environmental choice.

We’re glad Amazon has taken the time to provide easy access to green products. Now that they’ve educated consumers, we just have to do our part to shop consciously!

Sprint has recently pushed out their latest new cell phone called the Samsung Reclaim. They’ve hailed it as “Eco fun for the environmentally conscious.”

The phone boasts 80 percent recyclable materials and a casing that was made with 40 percent bio-plastic materials extracted from corn. However, when I clicked the “get it now” link the information on that page tells me the phone is made from 80 percent recycled materials.

Both ideas, recyclable and recycled, are two very different things. Recyclable means the phone can be discarded in an environmentally friendly way and recycled means the phone is made from parts that once belonged to an older phone. Either way, it’s a forward thinking phone from a forward thinking company.

In addition to recyclable packaging and a one click green button that gives you access to the latest environmental news, the phone comes with all the great basic features associated with a smart phone. It has a full QWERTY keyboard, 2.0 MP camera and is GPS enabled.

Sprint has developed a page devoted to it’s environmental efforts, which include getting 80 percent of it’s power from a local Kansas wind farm.
Sprint has also pledged to increase cell phone recycling on all carriers, models and cell phone types. An idea we are, of course, very fond of.


According to their website, Sprint is the first and only U.S. telecommunications provider to publicly commit to significantly increase phone-recycling efforts. “We’re pledging to collect an amount equal to 90% of what we sell per year by 2017,” they said.

Though the phone is exciting, I would have liked to see a few additional green features added to the mix. Perhaps their eco friendly home page could include information on where to buy refurbished or used phones for the eco conscious who don’t want to create more devices. Sprint also could eliminate the need for a new charger by making the outlet the same as older models and not including new ones in the box.

But overall, it’s nice to know that consumers really do vote with their dollars. Manufacturers are responding by creating products like the Samsung reclaim that can appeal to our environmental consciences, even if they are motivated by the bottom line.