Put Up or Shut Up
October 1, 2007 1:42 PM   Subscribe

Last weekend's PICNIC'07 conference in Amsterdam featured a Green Challenge: to come up with the best marketable green idea that could be developed and sold to consumers within two years. Dutch decentralized renewable energy company Qurrent took down the big €500,000 prize for the Qbox: a device which creates optimizing energy algorithms for all devices in a home. See also: Green Thing.
posted by chuckdarwin (10 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love it! We need more green toys like the Qbox.
posted by lamarguerite at 4:14 PM on October 1, 2007


I thought the best marketable green idea was discovered in Amsterdam a long time ago.

*runs out of thread*
posted by Brak at 4:22 PM on October 1, 2007 [1 favorite]


So much automation... I wonder if people will actually be able to work with it.
posted by anthill at 4:36 PM on October 1, 2007


.... sigh ....

We are all going to have to individually generate our own power and clean our own effluent and grow our own food if we want it done environmentally, huh? If only Blackwater made its money doing native plant restoration.
posted by salvia at 5:02 PM on October 1, 2007


Okay, on the bright side, the Qurrent QBox or whatever is actually pretty cool. It's just the change-the-world-via-consumerism thing that I'm tired of. Organic cotton sheets are great but not as great as a ban on methyl parathion.

But the post is pretty cool. Can you just tell us what the green thing is without us having to give it our email addresses?
posted by salvia at 5:09 PM on October 1, 2007


Snazzy.

On a slight derail, does anyone know what typeface they used on the Qurrent website?
posted by spiderskull at 5:48 PM on October 1, 2007


Nevermind, it's Flux-Bold.
posted by spiderskull at 5:57 PM on October 1, 2007


So the solution to using too much energy is an electronics device that connects to computers running at HQ via the internet? Do they have the word "irony" in Dutch?
posted by DU at 6:41 PM on October 1, 2007


Would the savings from an average Qbox over its lifetime be more than all the costs (energy and pollution) of manufacture and eventual disposal?
posted by D.C. at 10:51 PM on October 1, 2007


Can you just tell us what the green thing is without us having to give it our email addresses?

I'll let you know when they email me.
posted by chuckdarwin at 1:10 AM on October 2, 2007


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