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First Day @ PUSH 2008

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I'm speaking tomorrow at PUSH, an interesting conference here in Minneapolis, MN

The first session that just wrapped up was quite interesting - Chandran Nair took us through a look at the world's problems and how many misconceptions there are about what can solve them. What I found striking was the comparison of world problems to spending on trivial/much less meaningful things:

Health & Nutrition ($13B) : Petfood Spending in the USA ($17B)
Water and Sanitation ($9B) : Ice Cream in Europe ($11B)
Education ($6B) : Cosmetics in the USA ($8B)

Jonathan Greenblatt, one of the co-founders of Ethos Water, also gave us a compelling look into the world of Water and how simple and cheap ($25/person) it is to solve. The one thing I don't get - on a $1.79 bottle of water, Starbucks (which acquired Ethos) donates 5 cents (10 cents in Canada oddly). They were founded on the basis of donating 50% of profits... I can't believe profit on that bottle of water is only 10 cents! (considering how much cheaper other bottled water is). Anyway, he now works with a new magazine - GOOD - which has a unique subscription model of giving away the $20 subscription fee to a charity of your choice.

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Comments

hugh Hugh Switzer
June 16, 2008 | 4:36 PM
Checked into Ethos -- lots of critic sites out there! Someone pointed out, that in order to reach Starbucks' new goal of donating a pitiful $10 million by !!2010!! they would need to sell 200 million bottles of the water (in the US) which would bring them in about $360 million USD.

There are lots of critical sites out there.. here are the two best I could find in 30 seconds of Googleinggg

http://thetruthaboutethos.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos_water
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