home » 1BOG/Virgance — now that’s what I’m talkin’ about

1BOG/Virgance — now that’s what I’m talkin’ about

by Paula | 18 November 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: peak oil, entrepreneurship
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Ah, this is the kind of thing I love!

One Block Off The Grid is a San Francisco-based initiative driving residential adoption of solar power. 1BOG works by collecting together a lot of people who want to install solar in their homes, negotiates bulk discounts from solar equipment suppliers/installers, and helps defray costs to homeowners further by raising private funds from sponsors and partners. 1BOG managed to get 180 San Francisco residents signed up in only 2 months; 35 residents signed up within just 3 weeks. That’s impressive.

Virgance is a for-profit San Francisco startup that creates “products that focus on using online social networks to create positive social change.” So far, Virgance’s projects focus on channeling the collective power of the crowd into what Catherine Austin Fitts calls “voting with your dollars.”

Virgance acquired 1BOG recently and together they are bringing collective solar haggling to 20 cities across the US. It’s a match made in heaven.

Virgance poses some provocative questions on its about page:

What if you could build a company whose product was “good”? Some companies make car stereos or scented candles or frozen tater tots. But how might a company produce “positive social change”? Lots of companies make things that could somehow be used by others to create good, but what about a company whose very function was to create as much good as possible? Could such a company give its employees the satisfaction of working to save the world, as well as the same robust salaries found at comparable for-profit companies?

Humanity currently faces a number of urgent problems in need of big, innovative solutions. The power of the business world is vast… what sorts of solutions can we create to harness that vast power and steer the resources of the business world towards a sustainable future? What if activism is an emerging market?

1BOG & Virgance are excellent models for those of us toiling in the “peak oil space” (to borrow a tech industry buzzphrase). The questions Virgance poses are equally relevant to us as well if we consider good to be synonymous with powerdown: What if you could build a company whose product was “powerdown?” How might a company produce “powerdown?” Lots of companies make things that could somehow be used by others to create powerdown, but what about a company whose very function was to create as much powerdown as possible? What if powerdown is an emerging market?

Indeed, powerdown is not just an emerging market… it is the emerging market. And it is potentially very, very lucrative for anyone who has the foresight to align his or her business model to go with that flow.

More info:

• Solar Activism Meets Social Networking @ ZDnet
• 1 Block Off the Grid’s Community Solar Initiative Expanding to 20 US Cities @ CleanTechnica.com

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