Good Ideas Blog

Welcome to our Good Ideas Blog.

Here we gather examples of products, tools and services that we love and that have been created following our own ethos: they don’t nag people to “do good”, but instead are all things people simply use and like because they are fun, cool, money saving or useful.

And yet in using these things, people are incidentally “doing good” and their actions are having positive effect on a major social or environmental issue.

Ideas posted regularly so keep coming back for fresh inspiration…..

Good Ideas Blog » Good is: » Saves-time

nest

Nest

September 3, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Saves energy, Saves money, and Saves time.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Environmental.

We love Nest (http://www.nest.com/)! It exemplifies the power that beautiful and intuitively designed commercial products can have in facilitating huge social and environmental change.

Nest, a new age thermostat, is a clever gadget that learns what you like and what you do over time to help you make tiny changes to your heating habits, saving you money on your energy bill. Brainchild of Tony Fadell, inventor of the iPod, Nest is an easy to fit, easy to use device that is very easy on the eyes. Boasting a iPhone app for controlling the temperature of your home remotely, and features like ‘Auto-Away” which autonomously lowers the temperature when it realises you’ve popped out, the Nest is said to be capable of saving a household $173 per year (and that’s before you’ve even begun experimenting with these amazing features).

This is a product that takes all of the advice of popular money saving communications and distills it into a practical and easy to use commercial product that keeps lowering your energy consumption even when you forget. That’s a clever, facilitative way to change behaviour. Saving households from huge energy bills, while providing huge incidental benefits for the environment that no one at the company even needs to shout about.

To read about Nest’s impact so far download their White Paper here: http://downloads.nest.com/efficiency_simulation_white_paper.pdf

GetGoing

August 27, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Saves time.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Environmental.

In 2012 GetGoing (https://www.getgoing.com/), a startup dedicated to discounts travel, launched a new service called Pick Two, Get One™ which lets flexible travellers design itineraries for two trips and then leave it up to GetGoing to book one for them. The idea is that GetGoing is then able to negotiate deals with airliners willing to get rid of spare capacity for huge discounts. When we consider that in 2012, passenger flights were only 78.94% full (the equivalent of one empty plane for every five flights) its evident that GetGoing has a lot of inventory to work with.

This has the potential to provide a triple win as airlines are making money on otherwise empty seats, travellers are getting cheap holidays with a touch of serendipity and the world is (theoretically) seeing less wasteful, half-empty planes sent into the sky. To give you just one stat, if companies like GetGoing could fill even half of the spare capacity of just 200 flights sent from London Heathrow to JFK this year, they’d save the planet 5.93 million kg of unnecessary CO2 emissions. That’s huge.

So while the company trades on value, discounts and the underrated element of surprise, we think GetGoing’s Pick Two, Get One™, which uses the same ‘spare capacity’ model that was pioneered by Lastminute.com 14 years ago, has the potential to deliver huge and scaleable incidental environmental benefits in a sustainable way.