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Families turn out for a recycling event in Frisco, Texas. (Photo: Frisco Green Living)

By Harriet Blake
Green Right Now

Most everyone is familiar with IKEA, home of affordable, assemble-it-yourself furnishings. But did you know that the company has a code of conduct known as the IWAY?

The familiar blue-and-yellow stores began in Sweden in 1943. As USA Corporate spokeperson Mona Liss likes to say, they “own the whole pipeline,” meaning IKEA controls everything from start to finish, from sourcing to the end product.

“We make sure that everyone follows the IWAY code of conduct,” she says. This means being careful about what chemicals are used; making sure the wood is certified; and that the workers are properly treated. The IWAY code began in 2000 and covers among other things the environment, responsible forestry management, working conditions and the prevention of child labor.

Liss points out that IKEA has been involved in the environmental movement since the early ’90s. “IKEA is a humble company,” she says. “We haven’t been beating our chests, but our sustainability practices have been in place for a long time. Sustainability has always been ingrained in how we work.”

Ever wonder how and why IKEA has such reasonable prices for its furniture?

One answer is “flat packing,” says Liss. Flat packing is a great way to transport furniture, she says. It involves shipping the different parts of a piece of furniture along with its screws and bolts. “Take the Billy bookcase, for example, says Liss. “We can ship 12 Billy bookcases in pieces and boxed for the same price as one assembled Billy bookcase. By shipping in pieces, you can ship more efficiently and use less CO2 in the process. The customer saves money on the item, and the company lessens its carbon footprint.”

On Earth Day, says Liss, “We will for the first time be communicating our ‘Never Ending List’ to the customer.” The list, which cab be found on IKEA’s website but is not usually promoted, features company practices that make IKEA sustainable.

Besides flat-packing and the IWAY code of conduct, the list includes joining forces with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to increase the availability of FSC certified wood and to address the problem of illegal logging; moving towards having its buildings supplied with 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and heating; printing the colorful IKEA catalog on totally chlorine-free paper; featuring at least one organic dish on all IKEA restaurant menus; and encouraging customers in some countries not to use their car by offering free shuttle buses. In Switzerland, some IKEA stores give discounts for home deliveries to customers who use public transit.

“The reason we call it our ‘Never Ending List,’ is because sustainability has no end point,” says Liss.

“One of our earliest initiatives was to phase out plastic bags,” says Liss, noting that IKEA was one of the first retailer to do so. “We reached out to the customer in 2007, announcing that we were beginning the phase-out. We gave them a six-month window. Then we began the phase out in 2008, selling our blue IKEA bags for 59 cents. If customers wanted plastic, we charged them 5 cents which we then gave to American Forests (a nonprofit conservation group).”

The program reduced plastic bag consumption by 92 percent, says Liss.

Another green initiative that IKEA has undertaken is the “I’m a Tree Hugger” program. The company’s trademark is wood furniture. Besides using wood that comes from certified forests, IKEA also plants trees to supplement the trees that are cut down to make their products. “We have planted well over a million trees,” says Liss.

Many of IKEA’s products are environmentally friendly, too. The Norden birch table makes use of the knotty top part of the tree trunk, which previously had been burned as firewood. The Klippan sofa, which is very bulky, has been made into a knockdown piece in which the armrests and back slip into the seating base, making it easier to transport and save on carbon emissions. The Lack side table and the Besta storage system are made with a wood-based frame filled with recycled, honeycombed paper – using less raw material than particleboard. Dvala bed linen is made with cotton that is grown sustainably, using less water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. And the Mandal bed frame with storage boxes is made from birch and pine, both renewable raw materials.

In addition to IKEA’s sustainability efforts, the company is involved in several social initiatives such as UNICEF and Save the Children. From Nov. 1 to Dec. 24, all IKEA stores sponsor an annual soft toy (stuffed animal) campaign. IKEA donates one euro for each toy sold to UNICEF and Save the Children projects in more than 25 developing countries including Albania, Bangladesh, Russia, Vietnam, the Ivory Coast, Uganda and China.

On a local level, IKEA often partners with its home community on environmental issues. In Frisco, Texas, IKEA has joined with the city for the fifth year to sponsor “Clean It and Green It,” as well as “Chunk Your Junk” programs.

“Clean It and Green It is a citywide clean up,” says the Frisco store’s public relations manager, April Berg. “Anyone can participate.”

All IKEA stores have drop-off sites where customers can drop off recycling items from home such as light bulbs, paper and plastic. And all stores have recycling canisters throughout the store for shoppers.

Every IKEA store has a recycling center for customers for disposal of cardboard, light bulbs, glass, plastic and paper. The service is strictly for consumer usage, not businesses, says Berg. This type of recycling is a requirement for all stores.

All food waste from the Frisco IKEA restaurant and bistro, says Berg, are processed and either composted or converted to biodiesel fuel. Not all food items are locally produced, says Berg, since much of the menu is Swedish. “But all our factories do abide by green standards,” she says.

Caring for the environment in their humble and modest way may be a reflection of IKEA’s Swedish roots, but company spokesperson Mona Liss believes these also may be traits that other countries, including the U.S., aspire to as well.

Copyright © 2010 Green Right Now | Distributed by GRN Network

This Suzuki micro-hatch appears to be headed for our shores.

The Suzuki Swift, now in its fifth generation, has never been sold here in the U.S. A Chevrolet Aveo–like, Daewoo-built vehicle called the Swift+ has been available in Canada for some time, but the actual Swift has primarily been exclusive to the European and Japanese markets. But that looks to change with the next-generation of the micro-hatch, caught here tooling around the Nürburgring.

Keep Reading: 2012 Suzuki Swift – Spied

Related posts:

1. Will the Next Suzuki Swift Come to the U.S.?
2. Suzuki Swift Plug-In Hybrid Concept – Auto Shows
3. 2012 Audi S8 – Spied

Kerry Killinger was the chairman and chief executive officer of Washington Mutual, the $300 billion savings-and-loan organization, from 1990 until 2008. During his tenure, he made more than $100 million in compensation, including more than $14 million in 2007 and $21 million in 2008 — granted for his oversight of WaMu’s tremendous expansion and rise in profitability, fueled by making loans to less-than-creditworthy borrowers.

In 2007, when the housing bubble started to burst, Killinger continued to stand by WaMu’s home loans business. With billions in losses racking up, in March, 2008, he rejected an $8-a-share merger offer from J.P. Morgan. Just months later, in September, 2008, WaMu went entirely belly up, with all of its shareholders effectively wiped out.

It is hard to pity Kerry Killinger — and less so after reading his prepared testimony for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). Killinger insists that the government seizure of WaMu, in the largest bankruptcy in banking history, was an “unfair” mistake. Moreover, he whines that WaMu was shut out from meetings between the Wall Street banks and Treasury and Fed officials:

The unfair treatment of Washington Mutual did not begin with its unnecessary seizure. In July 2008, Washington Mutual was excluded from the “do not short” list, which protected large Wall Street banks from abusive short selling. The Company was similarly excluded from hundreds of meetings and telephone calls between Wall Street executives and policy leaders that ultimately determined the winners and losers in this financial crisis. For those that were part of the inner circle and were “too clubby to fail,” the benefits were obvious. For those outside of the club, the penalty was severe.

As for Killinger’s contention that the government shut WaMu down rather than rescuing it because it was not running with the in-crowd: September and October 2008 marked the absolute height of the credit crisis. In the weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Fed and Treasury officials were concerned with averting utter economic catastrophe, not with punishing banks that weren’t part of the “club.” The statement is as absurd as it is tone-deaf. I will note that unlike most other executives testifying to Congress, Killinger does not use the words “sorry” or “apologize” even once in his 7,600-word testimony. (He does say he is “saddened” by what has happened.) He does not apologize to his shareholders, employees or the homeowners and average citizens who patronized WaMu.

And my sense is that in the coming week Killinger’s testimony will seem even more ridiculous. Levin’s committee’s report, due to be released in full on Friday, reportedly shows gross negligence and fraud at WaMu, which made hundreds of millions off of mortgage-backed deals before collapsing and spurring the “man-made economic assault” of the Great Recession, as Levin describes it in his blistering opening remarks.

by Tom Philpott

Not as sweet as advertised: industrial-scale sugarcane production in Brazil.This is a post about Brazil’s sugarcane-ethanol “miracle,” but I can’t resist starting off with a look askance at our own corn-derived ethanol phenomenon. Has there ever been a “green” technology more ecologically discredited than corn-based ethanol?

It may yield slightly more energy than it consumes during production—but only if you grant a generous credit to distillers grains, an ethanol byproduct now busily being shoveled into CAFOs (and exported to China) as a highly dubious livestock feed. But corn ethanol’s unimpressive energy balance makes it a pathetic candidate to displace energy-rich petroleum gasoline.

Moreover, its total greenhouse gas emissions are likely titanic—a fact limply acknowledged by the EPA and then eventually retracted under industry pressure. For the love of God, the stuff is based on industrial corn—by far our biggest user of soil-degrading synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

Yet the corn-ethanol behemoth lurches tediously along, forever demanding, and too often commanding, ever-spiralling amounts of government support and arable land. Sigh.

Too bad we’re not more like Brazil, where they’re displacing petroleum with highly efficient sugarcane-based ethanol …  right? Well, no. In 2006, I co-wrote an article about what Brazil’s much-heralded cane ethanol revolution has to teach the United States. The conclusion: not much.

Now comes this blistering report from Foreign Policy magazine exposing the myth that sugarcane ethanol is some sort of environmental panacea.

Before I get to the details, I want to make the point that the biofuel-as-panacea impulse is only possible in society’s whose citizens fundamentally don’t understand agriculture. Biofuels are hailed as “renewable,” because crops can be grown on the same land year after year. But monocrops destroy soil—properly thought of as a non-renewable resource—and require lots of agrichemical poisons. Therefore, industrial-scale biofuels aren’t renewable. (Whether biofuels can work sustainably in regional niches, as part of a diverse cropping system, is a different question).

Okay, where was I? In the FP piece, author Nikolas Kozloff jumps right to the point in his lead:

While sugar cane ethanol is certainly less ecologically destructive than some other biofuels, the industry’s boosters have overlooked one key fact: You’ve got to plant sugar cane somewhere. One couldn’t pick a worse place to harvest cane than Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest. There, sugar cane crops have led to deforestation and, paradoxically, more carbon emissions.

He goes on to explain that the flattening of the Atlantic rainforest—distinct from the Amazonian one—stands as the original sin of Portugal’s colonization of Brazil. The history of several tropical crops we now take for granted—for example sugarcane and coffee—is essentially the history of razing of that vast forest (twice the size of Texas, with as much biodiversity as the Amazon forest). And this ecological crime was compounded by the use of slave labor, Kozloff reminds us. “The colonists shipped six million African slaves to Brazil to do the cutting,” he writes: surely one of the vilest episodes in human history.

Today, just 7 percent of the original Atlantic rainforest remains—and sugar producers are busily tearing into that precious remnant as ethanol production kicks up. In the last year alone, Kozloff writes, the government has had to fine two dozen companies for illegally clearing some 143,000 acres of Atlantic rainforest to plane sugarcane.

The explosion in cane-based ethanol has potentially dire implications for the Amazon rainforest, too. I shouldn’t have to note that the Amazon is one of the globe’s great climate-stabilizing assets. It’s also home to groups who have been living there for generations—making use of its resources without destroying them. Any “green” fuel that triggers Amazon deforestation and displaces people is an abomination. Even though sugarcane doesn’t do very well in wet conditions, “hundreds of thousands of acres of sugar cane have been planted in the Amazon,” Kozloff reports. Then there are also indirect effects—cane displaces other crops and pushes them into the Amazon region. Kozloff writes:

In the state of São Paulo, sugar cane has been planted on former pastureland and this has pushed cattle into Mato Grosso. Hundreds of thousands of cattle are moving into the Amazon every year as a result of displacement by ethanol in the state of São Paulo alone, say environmentalists. This migration is becoming all the more likely since one can purchase 800 hectares of land in the Amazon for the price of just one hectare in São Paulo. Additionally, some soy plantations in the center of the country have been turned over to ethanol production, prompting concern among environmentalists that this will lead soy producers to move into the Amazon. And local observers say that sugar cane plantations are already pushing soy farmers and ranchers into the rainforest.

Then there’s the problem of nitrogen fertilizer. As in, sugar requires plenty of it.

The Brazilian ethanol industry uses more than 240,000 tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year [TP note: compared to about 1.9 million tons for corn-based ethanol] at a cost of about $150 million. At a public senate hearing in Brasilia called to discuss climate change, experts expressed concern that nitrogen fertilizers used in conjunction with sugar cane production yielded nitrous oxide. What’s more, when you cut cane by hand you’ve got to set controlled fires in the fields to smoke out razorsharp leaves, nasty snakes, and tarantulas. In the middle of the night, plantations look like a war zone as burning fields light up the sky and the wind blows billowing smoke clouds far and wide.  Not only do the burnings pollute the air with soot, causing a number of illnesses, but they also release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and nitrous oxide.

Finally, in keeping with the historical tradition of sugarcane production, working/living conditions in sugar fields are brutal.

Today the Brazilian sugar cane industry is centered in the state of São Paulo—drive just an hour out of the city and you can see sugar cane fields stretching for hundreds of miles. Palmares Paulista is a rural agricultural town 230 miles from São Paulo. Behind rusty gates lies a squalid red-brick tenement building. Inside, weary migrant workers breathe the stale air and try to prepare themselves as best they can for the long day ahead. The cortadores de cana, or sugar cane workers, are crammed into tiny cubicles filled with rickety bunk beds and unpacked bags. They hail from the poverty-stricken, drought-plagued northeast and earn paltry wages.

What the FP piece teaches us is that unchecked expansion of Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol industry will likely lead to ecological disaster. Cane-based ethanol is no panacea. It may be “better” than it’s corn-based cousin—but that doesn’t make it an ecologically robust product. Pulling down trade barriers and allowing cheap Brazilian ethanol to flood the U.S. market—which same U.S. free-trade advocates are calling for—is no panacea, either.

I will be mocked for my lack of hard-headed realism for saying it, but here is a reality check: the royal road to a climate-stable and energy secure-future lies not in a mad search for “renewable” alternatives to gasoline. Rather, it lies in the direction of conservation and mass-transit alternatives to cars.

Related Links:

Bizarre ag policy, ethanol cage match, and more

Stephen Colbert on corn diapers, Jamie Oliver, and addictive junk food

Why are we propping up corn production, again?

If any of you are angry with the fact that the Toyota Celica is not rolling out of production lines anymore (although word is might come back) here’s a video to push the knife even deeper. I must say it looks amazing in this electric orange …

Do you wear silly hats? Glasses that cover more than 35% percent of your face? Have a beard, even though you can’t fully grow one? Wear jeans that fit extraordinarily well? Love coke? Then you’ll adore Microsoft’s Kin, in theory! More »

Vodafone UK is no longer selling the HTC HD2, but fortunately they have continued to support it, releasing their second ROM update now.

The new ROM, an unusual version 1.72, released yesterday, apparently brings unspecified “efficiency improvements”. 

For those who prefer to preserve their warranty and only use official ROMs, the download is available here.

Via Coolsmartphone.com

The ever-popular EECB (Executive Email Carpet Bomb) scored another direct hit with reader “Generic_Username.” He and his wife bought some closet doors from IKEA, but didn’t install them until some renovations were complete. When it turned out the doors were defective, G.U. and his wife were told they’d have to pay to have new doors shipped to their house. Ugh!

Luckily for G.U., we had a successful complaint letter to IKEA already posted that he could use as a template.

Here’s his story:

I ran into an issue with a set of Lyngdal sliding glass doors that my wife and I purchased at IKEA in November of 2009. Long story short- the doors were drilled wrong and didn’t line up properly on the track, clearly a defective product. When calling customer service multiple times and a trip to the store were fruitless I decided to write an EECB using the IKEA letter that reader Inderjit wrote as a template (http://con.st/288370). I received a phone call within 24 hours and my new doors are being delivered free of charge today!

Thanks!

-Consumerist reader “Generic_Username”

Below is the EECB I sent on 4/11/10 (you’ll notice some similarities with the Inderjit EECB):

Dear IKEA:

Please let me preface this letter by saying that I am normally a very understanding shopper. I’ve spent a number of years working in retail in various management capacities and know the difficulties associated with day-to-day operations. That said, I have no choice but to send this letter to you.

On November 30, 2009 my wife and I bought a number of items from your South Philadelphia, PA store. Among those items were two sets of Lyngdal sliding glass doors (78 3/4″ x 92 7/8″) for the brand new IKEA PAX closet system we purchased. We set up delivery at the store for the following day (12/1/2009). We were in the process of remodeling our first house and were not living there when the delivery was made. Consequently, we did not open, build, and install the doors until roughly a month and a half later when we moved in. The first set of doors installed without a problem and worked perfectly. The second set, however, had a problem. The holes drilled in the doorframe were apparently not even, and as a result the doors sat crooked on the track and didn’t close completely. This in turn made it impossible to open the drawers since they just bump into the edge of the sliding doors.

My wife and I are newlyweds- we were married on xxxxxxx (in fact, the vases used to line the aisle at our wedding were from IKEA). As I mentioned previously, we also just bought and renovated our first house. As you can imagine, this has been a busy time for us. We stopped in the Conshohocken, PA store this afternoon to pick up some furniture and decided to ask customer service what we should do about the doors. We were told we’d need to call the store where we made the purchase, give them the necessary purchase information, and they could arrange to have replacement doors delivered. It turns out that IKEA is aware of this issue, and I’ve found a number of accounts online describing the same issue.

When we arrived home I called the South Philadelphia store as instructed and was told that because we had exceeded the 90 days for exchanges and returns we needed to bring the original receipt to the store and speak with someone there. We don’t have the receipt, most of our things are still in boxes, but the store was able to pull up the transaction information and verify that we did indeed make the purchase we were speaking about.

I asked to speak to a supervisor and was forwarded to Terrell, who told me that IKEA is responsible for the items, not the delivery, and I’d have to bring the doors to the store and figure out a way to get them home. I told him that if I could do that I would not have paid $75 for home delivery of these products. I further explained to Terrell that I paid for functional products, and IKEA should be responsible for getting me these items.

As it stands, if I want to get working doors I need to somehow get the doors to the store, then pay to have them redelivered (all provided I can locate the original receipt). This isn’t right. My wife and I have spent more than $10,000 at IKEA over the years. We have never regretted a purchase until now. While this is not a large amount of money to IKEA, it is to us. We have come to expect a certain level of professionalism, quality, and willingness by IKEA to stand by its products.

We are not asking for a lot. We are asking for a set of working Lyngdal doors delivered to my home so I can give my wife a functional closet system. I do not want to pay for delivery, I already did that once. I’d like a call by Tuesday, April 13, 2010, and I expect that in light of our years of loyal patronage you will agree with my request. I am happy to provide details of the transaction including transaction number, date of purchase, and card type if requested.

Please make this right.

Calm polite emails are never a bad idea. Way to go, Generic_Username!

The EECB is remarkably simple to construct and launch. Directions can be found in our handy guide, How To Launch An Executive Email Carpet Bomb.

Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has really been making the press rounds these days.  We’ve seen him interviewed on CNN Money and German blog zeit.de amongst others, and this time around SlashGear was lucky enough to be able to sit down with the man for a brief interview.

There’s really nothing here that hasn’t been touched on in the previous interviews mentioned above – the usual questions about upcoming hardware, software, and behind-the-doors business goings on are met with the usual responses.  Also discussed are the lessons that Palm has learned from its launch with Verizon, Palm’s focus on expanding in Europe, the mobile advertising space and the prospects of licensing webOS (an idea the company isn’t "religious about" – a stance they’ve had since last year).

Still, interesting that Ruby is out there chatting Palm up when you might think the upper Palm echelons would be hunkered down – seems like webOS lovers should take it as a good sign.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

by Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Senate’s two principal authors of legislation to battle climate change said Tuesday they were putting the last touches on their bill and hoped to unveil it next week.

“I feel very optimistic about the progress that we’re making. I think that folks are coming together, but there are still some hurdles,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair John Kerry (D-Mass.).

Asked when he and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) would make the measure public, Kerry replied, “We hope next week.”

Graham said he and Kerry were reaching out to colleagues and major players in the climate-change debate with an eye on introducing the legislation, which quite likely will not see major action by the Senate until June.

“We’ve got some more work to do, but hopefully next week,” Graham told reporters. “We’re locking down a few issues, but we’re getting there.”

Introducing the measure would launch a months-long process that would see the legislation’s cost and scope evaluated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency. It would also likely need to be taken up by key committees of jurisdiction, which could modify the bill before a final Senate vote.

The House of Representatives passed its version of the legislation last June, creating a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming—a different strategy than the one being pursued in the Senate.

“Cap-and-trade as we know it is over, there’ll be some limited trading in the utility area,” said Graham, who declined to elaborate.

The Senate and House would have to pass identical legislation to send it to President Obama to sign into law.

Related Links:

How green are Obama’s potential Supreme Court picks?

Chicago considers getting serious about coal pollution

Chinese ship gouged two-mile scar in Great Barrier Reef

The all-new S60 is built at the Volvo Cars factory in Ghent, Belgium. The first cars will be delivered to customers in early summer 2010. The all-new Volvo S60 has its world premiere at the Geneva Motor Show on the 2nd of March.

New Volvo S60 2011 Trailer

BMW has repeatedly denied any plans of doing an M version of the 1-Series that would most likely be known as the M1 – however, teasers, rumors and spy shots of the car keep popping up on the web. The latest spy shots by Bridge to Gantry show a heavily modified 1-Series hitting up the Nurburgring (we also have a short 9 second video posted after the jump).

Click here for prices on the 2010 BMW 135i.

Last we heard anything, it was reported that BMW has no plans to do an M version of the 1-Series but you can definitely expect something like the 135is like the 335is we saw at the 2010 New York Auto Show.

Only time will tell – but the way we think of it if BMW can do an M version of the X5 and X6, they can definitely justify an M version of the 1-Series

Hit the jump for the video.

Spy Shots: BMW M1 (M version of 1-Series):

– By: Omar Rana

Source: Bridge to Gantry

Filed under: Performance, Bugatti

When you’ve been responsible for as many Formula One World Championships and devastatingly fast supercars – including the new McLaren MP4-12C (pictured above) – as Ron Dennis, you’re entitled to speak your mind… and for others to listen up. The executive chairman and part owner of the McLaren Group, Dennis has earned a reputation for his outspoken opinion, and this time directed his criticism toward the venerable Bugatti Veyron.

In a recent interview, Dennis characterized the Veyron as a “piece of junk” and “pig ugly”. Why don’t you tell us how you really feel, Ron?

The speed guru went on to allege that the race staged by Top Gear between the Veyron and McLaren’s own venerable F1 supercar on the streets of Abu Dhabi was exactly that… staged. According to Dennis, the McLaren had the Bugatti handily beat on every run, and that the video footage was edited to make it seem like the Veyron was the quicker of the two. Check it out after the jump and decide for yourself.

[Source: Wheels24.co.za]

Continue reading McLaren boss calls Veyron “junk,” claims Top Gear race with F1 staged

McLaren boss calls Veyron “junk,” claims Top Gear race with F1 staged originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pocas veces he visto un golpe tan tremendo y menos en un modelo tan espectacular y exclusivo y esta vez, no como en otras ocasiones, si que hay pérdidas personales. El suceso ocurrió en una autopista alemana, el conductor de este Porsche GT3 RS, de 39 años, pedrió en control cuando circulaba a gran velocidad y se estrelló de costado contra un árbol, en el suceso perdieron la vida el conductor y su esposa.

No se tienen más datos del incidente, ni la velocidad de circulación ni el grado de experiencia del piloto, la única conclusión que se puede sacar de este incidente es que, una vez más, la velocidad en ningún caso es una buena copañera de viaje.

Vía | Wrecked Exotics

The public is invited to attend a ceremony Sunday honoring four homeless Southern California veterans, whose remains were unclaimed at their deaths, putting them at risk of enduring burial in paupers’ graves.

Instead, the veterans, who were indigent and have no known family, will receive full military funeral honors at the Eternal Valley Memorial Park and Mortuary in Newhall.

The tribute is part of a national program known as the Dignity Memorial Homeless Veterans Burial Program, which is available in at least 25 cities across the country and has provided burial services to more than 675 homeless veterans since the program started in 2000, according to organizers.

The deceased servicemen to be honored Sunday are Raymond Frajardo, who served with the U.S. Navy from 1957 to 1963; John C. Newman, who was also with the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1945; Larry Lavine, a member of the U.S. Army from 1957 to 1958; and Edward Goodrich, an Army veteran who served from 1962 to 1965.

Little else is known about the lives of the former servicemen.

The Dignity Memorial network will prepare the bodies and provide caskets, transportation and coordination of the funeral service. The veterans will be interred on April 21 at Riverside National Cemetery, which will provide a grave liner, a headstone or marker and a graveside ceremony, organizers said.

Jim Biby, market director of the Dignity Memorial network of funeral, cremation and cemetery service providers in the Los Angeles area, said in a statement that paying tribute to homeless and indigent veterans ensures that they get “the honors in death that their service in life merited.”

Sunday’s ceremony will include prayers, the laying of wreaths, a gun salute and the military bugle call "Taps." Attendees will be given dog tags engraved with the names of the decedents, and a small reception will follow the ceremony, according to organizers.

Eternal Valley Memorial Park and Mortuary is located at 23287 Sierra Highway in Newhall.

— Ann M. Simmons

(Times are company conference calls. All times ET.)

Join the conversation about this story »

If I received a dollar
every time I get a question along the lines of "how can the content
industries compete with FREE?" — I would be traveling first class
everywhere I go. Underneath this question I often find my favorite toxic
assumption: "less control over distribution means less money."

This belief is as tired
as it is poisonous: enforcing control (when trust is really what’s
needed) will yield instant disengagement, which swiftly and surely will
translate into dwindling revenues — as the music industry keeps proving
again and again. If you believe in control rather than value and trust,
the content business of the future is not a good hunting ground for
you.

Take eBooks: despite
clear and present proof that DRM has proven disastrous in selling digital
music (and now is pretty much history), technical protection measures
are still being looked at to ‘secure distribution’. When will
they ever learn?

The thinking that the
digital distribution of content must be controlled to achieve any kind
of reasonable payment is fundamentally flawed because of this not-so-futuristic
realization: in our open, mobile, social and digitally networked economy,
content publishers need to offer their goods in a way that no longer
centers on the distribution of units (digital or physical) as the key
revenue factor. The idea of just selling copies is toast – selling
(i.e. offering) access is where the money is. Kevin Kelly said it years
ago: we must sell what can't
be copied, what’s scarce, not what is ubiquitous.

The irrefutable trend
is that the window of opportunity of 'selling copies' (be it iTunes,
eMusic, the Kindle or the iPad) is rapidly closing. The real opportunity,
the TeleMedia
Future, is in selling access
and presenting a constant stream of up-sells (i.e. added values and offering
content-related experiences). Remember, as Mark McLaughlin so
righly pointed
out in the HuffingtonPost recently, consumers have never really paid for content – they
paid for distribution! And now, distribution means Attention and Access.

Imagine when buying access
to eBooks, you wouldn’t just pay for the authorized enjoyment of the
authors’ words, but you would also gain instant access to highly curated
and socially-networked commentary, a fire-hose of meta-content provided
by your most important peers and friends that may also be reading these
books, and their ratings, explanations, slide-shows, images, links,
videos, cross-references — and maybe even some direct connections with
the author or the publisher.
In an access-based, bundled
and cloud-centric content ecology, being a legitimate and authorized
user enables engagement, conversation, relevance, personalization, meaning…
i.e. it unlocks really valuable benefits for the user. Connect with
Fans + Reasons to Buy (as has been mentioned on this blog a few times,
before, I believe) – that’s where the money is.

In music, streaming-on-demand
will without a doubt be available ‘for free' (i.e. bundled and packaged
by 3rd parties) or advertising supported, while many added values above and beyond the mere reproduction of music will not – no matter
whether WMG’s
CEO Edgar Bronfman thinks
it’s a good idea ‘for the industry’ or not.

Just imagine where an
access-to-the-cloud model could go next: if I want a high-definition
version of my favorite opera or that Blue Note Jazz Club concert from
last night I could buy a premium package that provides it. If I want
to share my personal play-lists, ratings and comments with my Facebook
friends, and get access to their content, as well, I can add the 'social
network option' to my package. If the price is right (micro-transactions,
anyone…?), I'll buy – because I am already hooked on the music.

The music industry needs
to ask itself this question: if a permanent, unprotected download of
a song would cost only $0.10, or if an ad-supported version of a on-demand,
all-you-can-eat music service would be seamlessly bundled into your
mobile phone subscription – would anyone still bother to scour the web
to find badly ripped, virus-laced tracks for free? Would we need 3-Strikes
or HADOPI or Digital Economy Bills?

Yes, I know, that price
point sounds ridiculous for those record label CEOs that used to sell
CDs for 15-25 Euros a piece, but hang on a second: if they can get 95%
of the users to buy access at a much lower price (and almost
zero cost of duplication and distribution!), and in that process really
engage with them, the fans would also do the marketing for them – i.e.
share the links. Sounds like a great model to me. But of course: selling
access at a much lower (or feels-like-free) price to quite literally everyone only makes
sense if it actually connects directly and smoothly to a multitude of
up-selling possibilities, such as interactive versions of eBooks, high-definition
versions of online radio shows, albums or concerts, in-depth analysis
and audio/video commentary for news, etc.

Now, content storage
is starting to move from my own computer or my hard-drives into the
cloud – and I think this is very good news for content creators, publishers
and rights-holders because it makes it even easier to engage and up-sell
to those new
generatives. Crucially, the
answer to the constant quest of monetization is also in the cloud: I
believe most people will soon stop sharing the actual media files (since
they are getting increasingly larger and larger, and therefore more
unwieldy) and will share only the links, the bookmarks, the metadata
or the tags, and that should be a boon for the content industries.

The perfect test bed
for ‘Media as a Service’ (MaaS) may unfold soon, with Apple's new
iPad or Google’s Tablet (hopefully). Extending the concepts mentioned
above, rather than blocking my wife or my kids from sharing an eBook
with me it would be much more logical if I could easily read her book,
as well; but beyond the ‘copy of the words’ all else would not be
available without a micro-transaction on my part, i.e. I would not have
instant access to the cool video clips, the updated links, the footnotes,
the ratings, etc; i.e. all that valuable context that will make eBooks
so much more powerful would be out of my reach until I validate my own
access.

The bottom line: content
sharing isn't the real problem: high price points, outmoded, pre-web
toll-booth concepts, broken relationships and processes, low values
for high prices, bad technology and service, and utter lack of conversation
and engagement are.

Here is my message to
publishers and content owners: lower the prices for access to your content
to the point of unanimous excitement, use open standards and technology
platforms that work for everyone, everywhere; bundle and package as
attractively as you can (then: repeat). Team up with ISPs, mobile operators,
advertisers and device makers.

Remove all the reasons
that your users may have to avoid your new toll-booths and skip the
desired conversion to 'paid' – the lower the hurdle for legitimate usage
and paid engagement, the higher the added values, the less you will
have to worry about 'competing with free'.

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By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Microsoft’s debut of the KIN yesterday has tech pundits talking about Microsoft’s mobile strategy, about the future of Windows Phone, and about the state of the “dumbphone” in general. It’s a compelling product. And because KIN comes from Sharp and Danger’s parent company Microsoft, the KIN drew a lot of comparisons to the Sidekick straight away. Yesterday, I called KIN the “Sidekick of the 2010s,” Ars Technica called it “Sidekick’s next of KIN,” and Wired said Microsoft wants to “update the Sidekick’s M.O. for a new decade.”

But does this mean the T-Mobile Sidekick is finished?

Since KIN is coming to Verizon, T-Mobile today said it is looking toward future devices that will keep the loyal Sidekick user base happy.

“Since its launch in 2002, the T-Mobile Sidekick has been one of our most popular and successful family of devices in T-Mobile history. This success is largely due to its loyal base of Sidekick fans for which we will continue to innovate and deliver an exceptional experience,” reads a statement from T-Mobile today. “As Sidekick evolves, we are planning for moves toward new hardware and software platforms, which we expect will provide customers with a fresh, exciting user experience while maintaining the important features that contribute to a great messaging device.”

T-Mobile says it will continue to support all the legacy Sidekicks, but it is working toward the next iteration of the experience. That could mean the KIN is coming to T-Mobile, or it could mean something completely different could replace the carrier’s popular messaging phone.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010