Joint Eco-Venture: 3EcoBees

3EcoBees.com is a joint venture between us and Ambiendura, an environmental consultancy, that began a few months ago, and has now started taking on a life of its own.

The project is a collaboration aimed at developing and promoting green and sustainable projects in the region of the Algarve and hopefully across the country, for both tourists and locals in the area of eco-tourism, eco-investments and eco-lifestyle.

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The project started with talks about how great it would be to have a green region, to suddenly everything sprouting like wild fire.

We will be introducing the project at the Feira Nacional de Parques Naturais e Ambiente in Olhão, held from July 24th to 27th. We’re looking to work with businesses actively engaged in developing green, sustainable products and services in the Algarve and Portugal.

We’re also quite conscious of greenwashing and that is not our intention, our goal to encourage businesses to be green and help them connect to where they can get more information and support. In addition, 3EcoBees, will help promote those that are already green, and support investments both from national and international sources to continue developing sustainable projects in Portugal. So if you’re in one of those areas, we would love to hear from you.

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In preparation for the fair, we got working on our logo, icon, blog and holding page. We’re all working hard get the project ready, so for now the 3ecobees website is on hold, until our designer and doodler extraordinaire can take time away from other client projects. In the meantime, I took my marketing hat off and put on my web design cap, to fill in.

We have to say a big ‘THANK YOU’ to all the companies that are working with us and sending their information and products, and a special thanks to the 3EcoBees intern, Susanna a.k.a. “HelperBee”, for all her hard work so far. She’s been great and we couldn’t have gotten organized in time without her help - thanks Susanna!

Your User’s Experience. Who’s Watching?

Silly usability mistakes have a tendency to sneak up on even reputable sites like Tumblr.com.

If you offer a service online, hire or appoint a user-experience stickler whose role would be to review your website’s key customer touch points. Create a checklist, make sure error messages are warmly delivered and accompanied with additional direction. And please, try not to leave your customers hanging after you’ve given them the red font.

A simple link: “Forgot your password?” could solve this.

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Surely there are bigger usability violations committed on the web. Picking on Tumblr just happened to be convenient at the time of writing. This little violation should not be used against Tumblr - after-all, one can argue the “blue log in” does the trick.

The Dynamics and Intelligence of Creativity

When do we start being creative, where does it come from and how important is it to our future? This is an important issue affecting us more than we realize, and a question that’s finally getting due attention.

Wikipedia’s definition of creativity - Creativity (or “creativeness”) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts.

Unfortunately, until now ‘creativity’ for the most part, has been considered a cheap commodity relegated to dreamers, and believed to only gain real value after an artists death, but thanks to the last decade of technological change, the currency of creativity may just be on its way up.

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Creativity surrounds us in every day things from cars to cutlery - in what we do, see, use, eat, read, how we communicate, move and even how we feel; but how often do we take this powerful force seriously? The technology, communications and environment we live in today, have all pushed us to look at our world differently, and now maybe for the first time in history, we’re becoming cognizant that our survival is based on, and needs human creativity to flourish.

We are all born creative, giving us the ability to solve problems and innovate the world around us, it is also the only element that remains to tell our story when we are gone, the key to our human heritage. The proof that we existed and contributed from mind to matter, this has been proven time and again, from wall carvings and pyramids to the medicine and technology we use today. So what are we doing to encourage and support this precious and limitless asset, today and the future? Here is a fascinating perspective on this gift, and how we educate ourselves out of one of our most dynamic and collaborative survival tools.

Note: the video will play on TED Talks page.

The creativity and humor Sir Ken Robinson used to present this topic, is a quiet affirmation of the powerful and captivating connection we have to creativity even with just the spoken word. A human talent that resonates deep and can truly make a difference in how we live, listen, interact and perceive the world around us.

Robinson’s talk delivers an invaluable lesson - for people and economies to flourish, creativity needs to be encouraged, supported and respected in its many dynamic forms, and we need to appreciate the human potential in its entirety, rather than focus solely on wringing out more academics.

It’s the creative genius in us all, and what we bring to fruition that makes our world interesting - through design, art, music, dance, food, language and technology to name a few, it’s in everything we do. Creativity evolves our cultures and enriches our lives with depth, diversity and passion, making what we can accomplish limitless. If you stop to think for a moment, everything that surrounds us today, was once just a ‘creative’ idea. Can you imagine the world we would live in, if we actually focused on cultivating human creativity instead of depressing it?