I am starting a book club

August 26, 2008 – 5:42 pm

Want to meet tomorrow night and talk about “books, business and beyond”?

I am starting to run a book club in Seattle. It is going to be a monthly meeting which I am running using a website called Biznik.com .

Biznik has become the last month my favorite business networking tool and is very useful in getting the word out there about who I am and what I do. It is also one of those websites that are also a real community, which means that by giving you are also receiving. Sounds corny, I know, but in this case it is unbelievably true.

Providing a book club for biznik members is just a way for me to give something back, and maybe slip in a word or two about Eco-Libris while at it.

So check it out if you’re in Seattle:

http://tinyurl.com/5v9ny9

And if you decide to sign up to Biznik please use this link:

http://biznik.com/join/eylon-israely

Posted in biznik, linkedin, book club, book publishing, social networks | No Comments »

Blog, heal thyself

July 31, 2008 – 10:18 pm

Ok, I am going to give this blog another go. I’ve been writing more and more lately on the Eco-Libris blog, so apparently my writing muscle is aching to flex. It has been mostly eco-book reviews, and maybe I’ll repost some of them here.

Mainly I think this blog will be about my green business adventures in Seattle, the emerald city, with the occasional random thought. A professional focused blog, with a personal touch

Seattle? Yep. I moved here a couple of months ago and working my way into the green network. It’s been Green Drinks, LinkedIn and Biznik so far. I am actually co-hosting a green biznik event in about two week, and I will write more about it shortly.

Ok, over and out.

Eylon

Posted in green business, networking, linkedin, biznik, greentech, green technology, sustainable marketing, green marketing, ecology, blogging | No Comments »

From Eco-Libris - A special green offer for readers of Oprah’s Book Club new selection

November 16, 2007 – 4:23 pm

We published this earlier today on the Eco-Libris blog:

http://ecolibris.blogspot.com/2007/11/special-offer-for-oprahs-book-club-new.html

I read yesterday on USA TODAY on Oprah Winfrey’s book club new selection - The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. This is a great book and a great choice!

Eco-Libris believes that this 973-pages book should not be only a celebration of a great book and the joy of reading, but also an opportunity to discuss the urgent need in sustainable reading, which does not harm the environment. I read in the article that New American Library has printed 612,000 new “deluxe” Oprah editions. That’s a lot of paper and a lot of trees that are cut down for this special edition.

Eco-Libris aims to raise the awareness to the environmental impacts of using paper for the production of books and for the need in printing books in an eco-friendly manner.

Therefore, we are having a special offer for all the eco-conscious readers out there that want to buy the new edition of the book:

If you buy the book and you want to help the environment, please send us an email to info@ecolibris.net with your address and the first sentence of Chapter 4 (just to show us you bought the book..). Eco-Libris will balance out the book for the first 50 people who email us with the right sentence.

It means that one tree will be planted by our planting partners to balance out the paper used for the book. And we will send you our sticker made of recycled paper saying “One tree planted for this book” you can later proudly display on the book’s sleeve showing your commitment to the environment. And yes, we’ll send it in an envelope made of recycled paper.

We truly hope to see Oprah’s book club assist in promoting sustainable reading in the same way it helped with a great success to promote reading.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: a great green gift for the holidays!

Posted in ken follett, The Pillars of the Earth, book club, oprah, eco-libris, book publishing, ecolibris | No Comments »

Green Technologies and Open Source?

November 16, 2007 – 3:33 am

Call me a dreamer, but I had this idea that you can stimulate growth in a sector by using open source to lower the entry barrier for new companies. I wanted to find out how this can be applied to green sectors such as renewable energy research and so on.

Let me explain. Open source can make software free. Some famous examples of open source software that is used by many companies are the Apache web server, the MySQL database, Asterix telephony system and so on. Imagine the web without these free options and you imagine one that is years behind in research and development or infrastructure deployment.

Now what if we found a set of software tools that are essential to the development of green technologies, but are now still pretty expensive? And then started open source projects to make them free for developers to use? That would be great wouldn’t it? Of course! Or at least that was my theory.

So I posted a question to LinkedIn about it, hoping to generate some interest and ideas. Not everyone got it. Admittedly my explanation there was not as fluent as here. But I still got some good feedback.

I’ll summarize some of it here:

• Create simple and efficient tools for on-line collaboration to minimize the need to travel for work related collaborations (Michael Trup, Keith Milner)

• The Cyclos project was given as an example of an open source barter system developed by an NGO. (Fred Jonkhart)

On the other hand some problems were raised. First, that enabling green technologies will create more waste than they were saving (Robert Jackson). My answer to this is that if a technology is more wasteful than the problem it comes to solve then it is not really green by definition.

David Bird, however said that the fact that the open source solutions such as the Apache and Asterix servers enabled start-up to use the money for funding hardware, rack space, and bandwidth and to build out (yet another) globally load-balanced and fault tolerant on-line infrastructure. This instead of exploring resource sharing (web space, database etc.) And he’s got a point.

Thoughts? Ideas? Any Green developer out there that can share his or her perspective?

Posted in open source, clean technology, cleantech, greentech, green technology | 1 Comment »

Eco-Libris is featured on TreeHugger’s 2007 Gift Guide

November 16, 2007 – 1:52 am

Congratulation to Eco-Libris! TreeHugger published yesterday its 2007 Gift Guide for the upcoming holidays, and Eco-Libris made the cut
The guide is full with great ideas for gifts to many different types of people - from the outdoors lover to the person who has everything. Each type is also devided to three shades of green (light, medium and dark) to make it easier to fit the right green gift to for everyone on your gift list.

Here is the recommendation:

Ecolibris (book geek)
For the book geek on your list, Eco-Libris helps readers to put something back for all their bookworm pleasures. They figure that 20 million trees meet their demise for each year of US book sales; to get those trees growing they’ve teamed with three conservation groups to keep the world’s forests going strong. TH Link Product Link

I can definitely agree that we will be a perfect fit for the book geeks on your list, or any other eco-conscious reader (not only geeks..) you have there that loves books and also wants to help the environment.

We hope to see many people go green this holiday season with Eco-Libris. We’re soon going to offer more options for the holidays, such as gift certificates and sending our stickers with a beautiful greeting cards made of recycled paper as a unique and affordable green gift.