MakeMeSustainable, a social carbon footprint site
MakeMeSustainable is a Cambridge, Mass. company that lets you track how much carbon you are using in your daily lifestyle, and then lets you plan and follow ways to reduce that usage.
It also lets you share the results with your friends. It can be used by individuals, small businesses and even neighborhoods.
Amid growing concerns about the environment, several other sites have emerged lately to let you measure and then offset your carbon usage — such as Terrapass and Begreen — but no other site we’re aware of can track your carbon usage daily.
First, it calculates the tons of carbons you use each year — your so-called “carbon footprint” — based on your input. It asks you questions such as how your home is heated (oil, gas, etc), how big your home is, and where you are physically located (local climate affects how much you heat or cool your home, for example). Based on analysis of the power sources in your zipcode and state, it can calculate estimates of the carbon amounts you are using. You can help it fine-tune these estimates by providing it more information.
There’s a tour here.
See screenshots below.
It is free to sign up. It hopes to make money through targeted advertising, and by getting a ten percent cut when affiliated vendors sell products to members.
The company is bootstrapped and will be raising a first round of funding.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
