You look for the USDA organic label. You figured out what “locovore” means and shop accordingly.
But what about “fair trade”? Seems like there’s always another thing to figure out before buying food and products if you want to be kind to the planet. What’s this one about?
G Living has a handy primer on the fair trade system and even covers the economic side.
Basically, the fair-trade movement focuses as much on the people producing products as on the products themselves. Some crops — like coffee beans and the cacao in chocolate — are farmed by people living in wretched conditions. Young children sometimes have to work in fields instead of going to school. Corporations encourage careless pesticide use that makes farm-workers sick. And after suffering through all this to bring a crop to market, the impoverished farmers don’t get a decent price for their goods.
That’s where fair-trade certification groups like Transfair USA come in. Working with a network of third-party verification groups, Transfair certifies things like coffee, chocolate, rice, and flowers.
Fair-trade products must meet minimum standards for labor conditions, community development, and environmental sustainability. Fair-trade goods might cost a tiny bit more to the consumer, but that’s so the farmer who produced the crop actually gets a decent price.
Fair-trade certification is also available for some manufactured goods, so you can avoid sweatshop labor. Look for the fair-trade logo on products at your local grocery store, specialty shops, and on the web.
By DAN MITCHELL TO be safe, a column or blog post bearing the headline “Warren Buffett Invests Like a Girl” needs two things: it has to be written by a woman, and it has to be backed up with plenty of details. A recent post by LouAnn DiCosmo, an editor at The Motley Fool, meets both criteria […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net
I’m looking at a cell phone screen and four faces are looking back. It’s CTIA 2008, the biggest wireless and cell phone trade show of the year, and the CEO of iVisit, a multiparty video conferencing app for Computers, Macs, and mobile phones, is demoing the product, iVisit Teleport. I have to state, the slick, feature-rich app looks pretty cool on Orang Diamaleh’s large-screen smartphone.
iVisit Teleport's feature-rich app manages to avoid distraction.
The simplest way to consider iVisit Teleport is as a P2P social network that lets you call, chat, video conference, and transfer multimedia for up to 8 contacts at a time. You sign up for an account and can start adding any contact who has also registered with the service. Conferencing starts when you enter a room, after which you have an array of controls to launch multimedia sharing functions with a one-button click; that’s, tap or click the interface to chat, begin a video conference using the phone’s camera as the lens, send a file, and see a buddy’s GPS location on a map.
I like the glossy black interface, which packs in a lot of features without making the app feel overcrowded. The video quality wasn’t too shabby either, and definitely an improvement over other video software I’ve seen, but a lot of that input will depend on the abilities of the phone itself. On mobile phones, iVisit Teleport supports 120×160, 320×240 video. It will be interesting to see how iVisit Teleport plays out on an actual conference call when the app’s beta release goes live in April on Windows Mobile phones, and if the pricing will appeal more to consumers or small businesses. In the meantime, anyone can pre-register for the iVisit Teleport private beta or iVisit desktop for Windows and Mac.
With all the talk about social network aggregators over the past few weeks, you’d think they were going to reverse global warming.
Technology blogs have been chirping enthusiastically about “lifestreaming” services like FriendFeed and Socialthing, which claim to provide an answer to growing complaints about “social-networking fatigue.” They sort …
The mistake I keep observing is an assumption only the US is slowing down, and it’s business as usual ex-USA. And one may likely assume I’m going to toss out the typical when the US sneezes, the world catches pneumonia. I’m 27 years old. I’m lucky enough to haven’t grown up when America was […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net
Later this month, Adobe will release out of beta the AIR-based Adobe Media Player that we first saw at the Web 2.0 Expo a year ago. It’s a very attractive video player, needing only a more complete catalog to become a compelling product. (See the product manager’s pitch and demo at the end of this post.)
As with many AIR programs, AMP is a hybrid online/offline app. If you use it while you’re connected to the Net, it will download the media you’re subscribed to in the background, allow you to play streaming-only files, and let you browse the AMP catalog of media. When you’re offline, you’re only able to watch all your downloaded files.
Many video players have gone here before.
Being an Adobe product, the player is primarily a platform for Flash videos. To compete technically with other video sites, it displays videos in up to 1080p resolution. And the interface is slick and easy.
When you want to sign up for content, there are nice TiVo-like options. For example, you can select “catch up” to begin downloading a season of a show you’ve missed from the beginning, or you can have it show only the most current shows.
Content publishers keep a lot of control. They’re the ones who decide if their media can be downloaded to your computer or only streamed, when the media expires, and if it can be transferred. Publishers can also place ads on or around video files, and they have the ability to even send current advertising messages to run with videos that might have been sitting on a hard disk for a year already. Publishers can also direct the player to adopt skins or themes when specific media plays. Adobe keeps a portion of advertising revenues.
AMP gives you flexible fetching and saving options.
The focus on advertising sets AMP apart from iTunes, which is sales-based. Adobe will likely offer paid content subscriptions and buys in the future, however.
AMP competes with Joost, another video service that works offline (news). As of this writing, Joost has a bigger video library, although Adobe has clout that will likely help it narrow the gap.
I see AMP as a competitor to Hulu (related stories), even though Adobe’s Ashley Manning Still, who demonstrated the product for me, thinks about Hulu–an online-only Flash-based player–as complementary or perhaps a partner. But since both AMP and Hulu are competing for the same advertising revenues, I’d state that puts them at odds.
Missing from AMP, until some time in 2009 or 2010, is “multiscreen” capability–inherent support for portable media players and set-top boxes. Meantime, just hook your AMP-running laptop up to your TV. As mentioned earlier, it displays true HD video. No YouTube blockiness here.
If you want to try AMP, you can get the beta now at Adobe Labs, but you need the old beta version of AIR (also on Labs). If you want to try the shipping version, which works with the current 1.0 version of AIR, wait until later this month when AMP makes its way to Adobe’s shipping download page.
Either way, do try it. It’s both a good streaming player and a strong client for subscribing to and watching downloaded Flash videos.
It might not be a Wiimote, but it’s still got that whole “immersive” thing going on.
Linden Lab, publisher of virtual world Second Life, announced Thursday that its members can use some officially-sanctioned new toys to navigate the metaverse. Logitech’s …
(Credit: Wikipedia)
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