There’s a lot of waste in the computer industry. IBM has developed a solution that takes scrap silicon disks and makes them into solar panels.
Computer chips are made of silicon wafers that have to be perfect to be usable. Imperfect wafers are thrown away after sensitive data is removed. Now, with a new process by inventor Eric White, they can be reused and made into solar panels.
Using Online Panels
A while back, I wrote about online panels, a kind of focus group on steroids that companies are using to both lower their research costs and to scale survey data to be more quantitative than typical focus groups. These online panels allow more participants than focus groups, offer better representation of your target market, and scale as easily as surveys, usually at lower cost. What’s not to like? Nothing, if you use online panels properly.
Google’s Solar Panels Power Up
Some time ago, Google announced that it would install a number of solar panels on the much-discussed Googleplex. Those panels are now in place, on, and, according to the company, generating “an electricity output capable of powering approximately 1,000 average California homes.”
Online Customer Panels
Everyone knows about SurveyMonkey and Web analytics programs, but I heard about something new (at least to me) last week—online market research. I attended an AMA Webcast on Community Marketing on March 29 where one of the topics was how to attract online customer panels that provide high quality market research.