1. Marie-Jeanne Juilland @ Ferry Building: She's the helpful Silicon Valley coach supporting Swiss CTI startups entering the US market. Highly recommended!
   
2. Stephane, CEO of  Poken @ Pier 38: A thriving Swiss startup in a one of the most wonderful offices Amazee has ever seen!
   
3. Sunil , Cecily and Greg @ Monetasuite: Two startup colleagues with one of the leanest products I have ever come across: It measures the time you spend with specific email recipients -> great stuff for lawyers, accountants and other pros that do not want to think how much time they spend on each client (Cecily by the way is the daughter of famous management guru Peter Drucker!)
   
4. Greg and Luc @ Swissnex: the ultimate hub for all Swiss Web entrepreneurs that want to rock the US market.
   
5. Now off to meet Jürgen Schwärzler, who just launched this new google project!

Did you participate in Earth Hour 2009? Last Saturday millions of people switched off their lights and electrical appliances in order to set a sign against climate change and global warming. I personally enjoyed a low-lit dinner that night. Now the Boston Globe, responsible for the great series The Big Picture, has awesome photographs from around the world documenting Earth Hour 2009. You can click on most of them to fade in and out of the darkness (Java Script must be enabled).

On the 23rd and 24th of March Gregory and I attended a workshop about “Sustainability Marketing” in Berlin organized by the German governmental department for environment (Umweltbundesamt) and other partners, which is part of a governmental initiative called komm (N). This workshop brought together leaders from three areas: corporations, NGOs and web platforms with a focus on sustainability or strong activities in this area. About 30 people participated to achieve the following goals:

• exchange of experience. What are the success factors for sustainability marketing?
• Create ideas for new projects and cooperations
• Start a new real network for sustainability marketing in Germany.

Michael Bilharz from the Umweltbundesamt opened with the following statement: „It has never been as easy as it is now to change and improve the world.“
Feel good – almost for free. Just turn off the stand-by, buy cotton shopping bags. Of course these small efforts are important, but we should not overestimate the effect: He showed an interesting slide on the energy consumption of Germans: LOHAS had the impression that their consumption is 30% lower than that of the average German citizen. A survey showed that in reality, their consumption is identical to that of an average German. So they feel better, but they actually aren’t.
Dream goal of LOHAS are win-win situations: individual benefits with low efforts. And the maximum effect for the environment. Fact is that the CO2 emission per person year is 10 tons CO2 per person (worldwide average is 4.5). Goal mark is 2 tons per person.
BTW: LOHAS is an acronym for Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability (www.lohas.com)

So how can we get there?
We need to differentiate „peanuts“ and „big points“.
Big points are those that result in significant reductions of CO2. Some examples of big points are: have a small flat, don’t fly, don’t eat meat, and don’t have a car. The problem with big points are that most of them are quite a sacrifice and therefore not really marketable. So we have to find key points. Key points are those big points that have the potential to become trends without being seen as huge sacrifices. They have to be 1) relevant, 2) sustainable (long-term) and 3) visible. Visibility is very important. There is a normative pressure when something I do is visible for others. Examples are car-sharing, investments in reusable energy, bio-food, and energy efficient cars. Investing 10,000 Euro in wind energy would compensate my total yearly CO2 emission.

So Bilharz’ conclusion from a political point of view is: 1) Address important issues first rather than trying to follow and improve everything 2) rather invest in something sustainable than trying to change existing routines.
So is sustainability equal to CO2 emission reduction? No, but social justice can be achieved with that. That is his thesis.

Amazee has determined two main action fields where campaigns will be initiated... just these two abbreviations as a teaser: WE and CC. More to follow when the time has come :)

At 2009's startup camp we decided to create a series of theme specific meetups for Switzerland's Web entrepreneurs. The talk was walked and in the meantime we gave birth to the small but powerful Chuchi meetups (Chuchi is the Swiss German word for kitchen). Like with the ice cream parlour there's one for every taste: UX Chuchi, Marketing & Sales Chuchi, Community Chuchi, Business Chuchi and the International Chuchi! Below some impressions from some of our last chuchis hosting people from amazee, cassiber, cmsbox, doodle, gbanga, google, greenoptions, namics nektoon, streamforge, wuala and xihalife!