Cambridge and Somerville Local First - 2011 Coupon Book - Shift Your Shopping to Local First

Help the ‘ville get Googled

Jul 27 11:28 am

by Sarah Rossi.  Intern, City of Somerville Communications Department

Attention Somerville Residents:  Help bring ultra high-speed internet to Somerville!

Google plans to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. This program, called Google Fiber for Communities, will launch an extremely fast broadband network that will deliver speeds up to 1 gigabit per second (over 100 times faster than what most Americans currently have access to).

Somerville has worked to bring this high-speed internet to our city (see video below), but it is our job as a community to drive the point home!  Here’s how:

We plan to drop a “Google Bomb” to emphasize our interest in this beneficial opportunity! Sign in to your Twitter (or a friend’s) and simply tweet the following message: “@Google #SomervilleGigSpeed”  Editors Note:  You can add a personal message of course

To show Google we are the perfect city for this program, we are developing a website that will keep track of the Twitter tags, so tweet often!

Feel free to check out this site for more information:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html

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Local Product Design Firm Introduces Clean Drinking Water Technology

Jul 25 9:43 pm

by Chris Templeman

Templeman Automation is a Somerville based product design firm. We are committed to using our product development experience to develop technology that is beneficial to society.

Currently, we have an entry in the Create the Future Design Contest called SOLution, a device meant to improve SODIS low-cost water disinfection.

Everyday over 4500 children die due to a lack of clean drinking water. Solar Disinfection (SODIS) is an inexpensive and effective method of water disinfection. Exposing clear plastic bottles filled with contaminated water to a sufficient amount of sunlight disinfects the water, making it safe to drink. Ultra-violet (UV) light and heat from sunlight kill bacteria, viruses and parasites. Studies have shown that SODIS requires 6 hours of sunlight, but cloud cover, location and seasonal changes cause the time required to vary. Real-world implementations of SODIS have been limited by the lack of a mechanism to determine and display when water has been disinfected.

SOLution is a solar-powered device that accurately measures sunlight and clearly displays when water is safe to drink. SOLution displays a universally recognized “happy face” or “sad face” to indicate water safety.

SOLution is rugged, reliable and reusable. Constructed of parts typically found in a solar-powered calculator, SOLution is inexpensive (estimated < $5 USD), lasts for years and can be reused thousands of times and requires no maintenance (< $0.003 USD per use).

Templeman Automation is actively seeking partners to collaborate on real-world testing and community distribution of SOLution. For more information go to templemanautomation.com.


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The Relaunch of the Somerville Local First Website - A resource to find Locally Owned and Independent Businesses in Somerville

Jul 19 5:31 am

Welcome to the new SLF website!  We’re excited to completely relaunch our web presence in an effort to better promote the local movement and our members. At the same time, we hope to engage in meaningful dialogue with you, our fellow community members.

This site is intended to serve as a community resource: a place for learning and discussion.  To help you continue to Shift your Shopping to local and independent businesses, we are incorporating a number of new features:

  • The SLF Blog – Our new blog based site will feature wide ranging contributions every week from many different sources, including:
    • SLF Staff, Interns and Board of Directors
    • SLF Members – entrepreneurs, artists and nonprofit directors
    • Community Bloggers – community members who are passionate about ‘local’ and want to share their Somerville stories
    • National Experts – people around the country who are working to build strong local living economies
    • Multimedia galore!  - We’ll be posting photos, reviews, videos and more to the site in the coming months.  We hope these tools will continue to build the awareness and behavior change we need to take our movement to the next level.
    • Campaign and Event pages – We’ll have living pages dedicated to the link“>Shift your Shopping, link“>Harvest Fest and link“>JOIN SLF – We now have membership categories for businesses, artists, nonprofits and community members.  Each community can easily join our growing network and become part of the movement to build and sustain our local economy in Somerville.

This is just the first step to developing a community resource for local economies like no other.  We want to know what you think…in fact, one of the main reasons why we chose this format was to create and foster dialogue.  So if there’s something you’d like to see, something you like (or don’t like), please let us know.

Stay tuned this week for daily blog posts, including the beginning of a video series on SLF developed by Street Attack. We will also be hearing from our first Community Bloggers and providing more details on our Shift & Save coupons and mobile applications!

Shift Happens

~jG

Filed under: 10% Shift, Harvest Fest, Local First, Move Your Money, Shift Your Shopping, SomerFun
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