Obama’s PR machine continues to fire on all cylinders to reassure a nervous America worried about trillion-dollar deficits stretching as far as the eye can see.

With imports continuing to extend a runaway trade deficit and no serious solutions to reverse the trend, Obama has a mountain to climb and little hope of stemming the crisis.

In an open letter to Timothy Geithner this week, trade2save urged the Administration to provide tax incentives to retailers offering to buy and sell used products to consumers.

Chris Whittome at trade2save writes “The amount of products coming into the U.S compared to exports is staggering.  Any attempts at cost cutting or reducing government spending pales to insignificance if we can’t get the trade deficit under control.”

Encouraging pre-owned could reverse a worrying trend

The argument put forward by trade2save is simplistic, but none the less compelling - “too many products come into the country compared to what goes out. If what came in was more readily reused and resold, the demand for imports would be significantly reduced.

$200 Billion a year on consumer electronics

Chris Whittome adds “Each American spends on average more than $1200 a year on consumer electronics. If half this amount was bought pre-owned locally, the trade deficit would shrink by $200 Billion a year. The money saved would likely divert to either locally produced goods and/or reduce consumer borrowing.”

More tax revenue for the local and federal government

Local and federal government would also benefit from increases in sales tax revenue as more pre-owned electronics were traded in the local economies at the retail level.

A greener more efficient economy

Tackling ewaste is a primary objective of the Obama Administration’s environmental policy. “Because buying a used product lengthens its life, encouraging pre-owned would also be in harmony with the Administration’s effort to tackle the explosion of e-waste and its links to pollution and global warming.”

Next month, trade2save.com will be launching an online trading portal where customers will be able to sell their pre-owned electronics to them, and also buy used ones with a satisfaction guaranty and 1 year warranty. “We hope that one day soon, buying a pre-owned electronics product will become as common and worry free as buying a certified pre-owned car from a dealership.”

It’s been a long time since our last blog post, in fact this is the first one this year and it’s already May!! But don’t think for a minute that trade2save has been in hibernation. We are very close now to launching a fabtastic new website - having overshot by about 9 months! My friends in the valley reassure us that a 9 month overshoot for a website of this scale is quite normal - well kind words I suppose, but back to the subject title…

We have looked very closely into the very high brow pricing tools that a number of sites are starting to use when buying products off of customers.

In some of my previous blogs I rant about poor trade-in prices given by online e commerce sites who are prepared to buy your used electronics for cash or trade-in value - See my previous posts about Best Buy and Sony (who both use ’sophisticated pricing tools to get you the best possible price’ - ’searching through thousands of prices for up to the second accuracy’) -

The marketing push for this service and also the success of buying-in trading portals like Gazelle (who’ll give you cash for your goods on the spot) show that there is a very large and lucrative market of not so savvy customers who won’t use eBay and flinch at the thought of opening their front door to a potential rapist who answered their ad on Craigslist to buy their used laptop.

These customers choose safety and convenience over squeezing every last buck out of their used digital camera - but boy are they paying through the nose for it!

One thing that unites what I like to call the rip off portals, is the use of so called sophisticated pricing tools. Basically what this means is getting a bot to trawl through sites like eBay and Amazon to get a price for what you’re selling, without them having to hire a team of pricing analysts who answer the phones or live chat with customers without needing to regularly update the prices on their database using standard demand and supply techniques.

The problem with these Bot pricing tools is that although they save trading portals a lot of money in terms of staffing, they are notoriously inaccurate.

To counter this problem, buying portals need to factor in a huge margin (in their favor naturally) - to prevent any inadvertent and costly mistakes the bot has gone and done.

Another issue is that they will never come close to any price a customer could get on eBay or Craigslist, so why bother trying? Why not tap into the market of the unsophisticated and blind them with technology, simplicity and cute little graphs showing a 6 month price index and forecast of the future price expectation (Why does the price graph always look the same?).

At the moment, unsavvy customers wanting to sell or trade-in their electronics can choose the difficulty of eBay or the simplicity of Best Buy, Sony or even Gazelle. I know which choice my mother would take, and this is precisely the market which is proving to be so lucrative - a suprising statistic given the state of everyone’s pockets today.

It’s not a very fair choice for people like my mum, but it’s a choice which they take willingly, in a complicated world, simplicity is the key for them - let others haggle on eBay for those extra bucks their laptop or cellphone might be worth.

Until, that is, they come across a simple, easy and sophisticated site which will actually give them an honest buck for their electronics. Watch this space…

The latest Laptop range from Apple is a new milestone in the company’s ethos to make more environmentally responsible consumer electronics. Critics like Greenpeace, who regularly beat their environmental breast plate to the rhythm of itunes have been strangely silent about the launch until recently. This may have been thanks largely to their inability to adequately market their evidence of ewaste abuse in China and trying to point a finger directly in the face of Steve Jobs.

They learned the hard way that it’s simply not cool to slag off something that’s considered cool to a large sway of their traditional support - college students and graduates. The backlash against Greenpeace was not a calculated stealth mission by a clever PR executive in Cupertino. The backlash came from within and was loudest on the Greenpeace website and blog.

As a result of falling contributions, Greenpeace has had little option but to back off so to speak - but the damage has been done, and it will take some time before they can shake off the conception that they’re a bunch of sanguine pretenders who pick on household brands to gain attention and not much else.

The good they have done on the subject of ewaste should not be swept under the carpet just because they’ve made a few tactical mistakes in their ongoing fight against ewaste.

It was Greenpeace who first opened our eyes to Guiyu, China. It took an organization like Greenpeace with a tradition of cutting through bull and border controls to bring home the shocking images of children, their hands and feet covered in mercury residue while washing themselves in a putrefied river, their single water supply.

Before then, people didn’t have any visual perception of how great the problem was. It was never considered a humanitarian crisis. Visual perception is a powerful weapon that can get things done fast - a power mobilized to full affect during the Ethiopian famine of 1984/5. For months previous we heard of thousands of people starving in Africa, but it took a crack team of BBC journalists to bypass border controls and get the images out. The rest was Bob Geldoff history, live aid and a fund raising PR machine which still raises millions today and provides rock stars like Bono and Sting a ringside seat at G7 summits - such is their influence as power brokers of global public opinion.

The revelations from towns like Guiyu had a similar opportunity to broker a new movement to tackle ewaste as a humanitarian issue, but the solutions proved to be complicate - it was much easier for Geldoff to scream at the camera “Give us your fucking money!” Raising money to buy food for the starving is a challenge - changing the fundamental problems of an eight hundred billion dollar electronics industry is something else.

If the problems of an industry can be distilled down to a single issue it is this: Only 10% of consumer electronics is recyclable. 90% will end up either in the ground or littered on the ground. Extracting the precious 10% out of this ewaste takes the lives of tens of thousands of peasant workers and their families every year through illness and disease caused by the toxic pollution created from the medieval recycling methods employed by their employers, who are (to all extent and purposes) gangsters.

Today GM and Chrysler are chastised for poor cars and wasteful management practices. But they are still able to produce cars which are over 90% recyclable. How is it that a car can be 90% recyclable, yet the greenest computer is still only 10% recyclable?

A car is 90% recyclable, the greenest Laptop is 10% recyclable… here in lies the green myth.

We don’t see mountains of cars rotting in piles so large they can be seen from space because legislation has been active for decades which demands adequate recycling and re-use. Your shinny new Hummer may guzzle that petrol, but you can be sure it’s made of 90% recycled material. Something to consider the next time an eco-warrior on his bicycle smugly tuts you to the tunes of his 10% recyclable iPod.

What’s more, 90% of cars are re-used 2-3 times (through second hand resale) before they are eventually recycled… compare this to 7% of consumer electronics.

90% of cars are re-used 2-3 times before recycling… only 7% of consumer electronics are re-used

Until electronics manufacturers have to abide by the same laws as car makers, the piles of ewaste will continue to double every 4 years. We are not going to stop buying electronics. What we can do is increase the reuse of electronics from a paltry 7% to a more respectable 50-70%, bring them more in line with the car industry. This would mean a significant drop in electronics sales and a dent in the trade of unrecoverable ewaste. We’d still be using the same cool gadgets with the same cool feature. Second Hand is cheaper of course, and with the economy on the bring of a depression, greener use of electronics might come sooner than later.

ewaste is something most people don’t attribute to themselves. But did you know that there is as much ewaste hidden away in homes as there is polluting the drinking water in places like Guiyi, China ?

As ewaste crusaders we want to see more folks trading in or selling their un-used electronics to other folks before they become obsolete. Because once they become obsolete, they become ewaste by definition.

   the answer is to trade in your electronics BEFORE they become obsolete

And that’s why we’re launching trade 2 save.

trade 2 save has been designed to make trading-in and trading up easier, while giving customers an honest trade-in price which is not the case with the ‘we buy’ trading portals currently available on the web.

At trade 2 save you’ll be able to buy and sell in the same transaction. You’ll be able to use the credit from what you’re selling immediately and you’ll get what you’re buying first. This is especially convenient for someone upgrading their cell phone. You get the cell phone you are buying first, and then send us your old cell phone in the packaging we supply (in most cases with free shipping) - all you pay is the difference in price if any. And in the same transaction you could also trade-in a DVD, a computer, some music, an iPod or something else.

And because we test and certify everything we buy off of our customers, the product you buy from trade 2 save will be graded for condition and guaranteed for a full year of normal use. This will enable customers to buy pre-owned with complete confidence.

When you sell to trade 2 save you’ll get 2 prices to choose from, a store credit price and a cash price. The store credit price is usually about 10-15% more than the cash price. The cash price is always good, however, if you are intending to buy something else from trade 2 save now or in the future, it’s always better to take the store credit, which never expires.

trade 2 save also has a marketplace where customers will be able to sell their products to each other using the same trade 2 save product pages. For this service, trade 2 save will take a small commission if you sell but will charge no listing fees whatsoever. It can remain their indefinitely.

trade 2 save will also level the playing field for small private sellers and so called power sellers. There won’t be any preferential rates - everyone will be able to take advantage of the same super low rates for selling on the trade 2 save market place.
We can’t always buy pre-owned, but when you trade something in to us we can sell it on to someone else before it becomes obsolete. Buying pre-owned reduces the amount of units demanded through manufacturing more, which will ultimately end up as ewaste.

   Did you know that only 12% of the material in electronics is recyclable?

Production of electronics and components have more than trebled in just a few years and only 12% of the material from them is actually recyclable (contrary to popular belief).

If you’ve got an old Pentium 3 in your garage that’s been sitting there for 4 years, then it’s too old to be re-used and re-sold. Recycling is the only viable option - providing it is not sent across the water to join a toxic dump (once 12% of it is extracted using toxic chemicals and a blow torch).

If you had traded the Pentium 3 in earlier before it became obsolete, someone else would have bought it pre-owned instead of buying another one new, reducing ewaste by a factor of 1 unit, or about 900 lbs of CO2.

These are tangible small changes to consumer habits which we can make at a time when we need to save money too. Trading-in your electronics and buying pre-owned when feasible doesn’t just make environmental sense it makes economic sense at a time when most of us are having to tighten our belts.

trade 2 save is set to open its beta site by Christmas.

Well that’s according to Greenpeace, who all but lost their credibility during their pitched battle with Steve Jobs - a quick look at the comments section shows what even their readers think of their persistent Apple bashing.

The new Mac Books now don’t contain mercury or arsenic which is a great start whilst the circuit boards and connectors etc are free of the usual bromine or PVCs. They still do contain cadmium  beryllium and antimon - I figured this simply because their removal is not indicated in any marketing information from Apple.

Apple have also published the Mac Book’s Carbon Footprint for the first time. Apple have included customer usage with this calculation in addition to the manufacturing of the unit. A Mac Book’s Carbon Footprint is about 1000 lbs of Carbon Dioxide, however, about 400 lbs of this is attributed to its usage.

It’s conceivable that a consumer might use their Mac Book wholly from renewable energy, say for example, their home electricity might be run through wind power or solar panels on their roof. Including a substantial ‘usage’ estimate into the mix is a good way of sharing the footprint blame with their customers  (while sharing the love of the Mac Book too).

Trade 2 save measures the Carbon Footprint differently. We don’t include usage estimates but base the Carbon Footprint on manufacturing, raw materials, transportation and the toxicity of none recyclable components.

Of course the greenest computer you can buy is a pre-owned one because you are not adding demand for a new one to be manufactured for you. And to make it greener still, don’t let it lie idly in your cupboard when you have finished using it, trade it in for an upgrade before it becomes obsolete - you’ll save money whilst saving the environment too.

The internet has brought about many great things, but none I believe are more great or more democratic than Craigslist. In an internet crowded with commerce, Craigslist enables everyday people to sell directly to each other. As most people do not pay a fee, it brings democracy to an internet dominated by big business.

However, buying from Craigslist does have drawbacks as some buyers from the site will contest to. When you buy off of Craigslist, you’re buying from a private seller - who is not obliged to offer any form of warranty. Buy sell and trade merchants (online or otherwise) have their advantages in this case, where customers can return goods if damaged.

Most Craigslist buys and sales have no problems, so if you’re prepared to take a small risk, you should always be able to find the cheapest price for the used product you’re after.

Online buy sell trade merchants like spun, secondspin, preplayed and soon to be launched trade 2 save, will always have their place when it comes to reliability, service and convenience.

With an annual energy production rate of 2000 KWh and an instantaneous power rating of 1.2 kW (1200 watts), the Mariah Power Windspire turbine could be the answer to the global energy drain being caused by consumer electronics.

Strong Black Friday trading suggests that come recession or depression, most of us now consider our gadgets integral to the running of our daily lives.

For $5,000, the Windspire can stand relatively unnoticed in your back yard and make all your gaming consoles, LCD TVs and other electronics instantly greener.

Unusual design

Because of it’s unusual design, cheap installation price and comparatively high energy production rating, the Windspire has won a host of awards, including the “GoingGreen” Top 100 Winner.

The first multi-unit commercial installation of 6 Windspires was ordered in Reno, Navada by Devon Bank, an LEED registered project. he LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environment Design) Green Building Rating System is a nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. Combined with the banks solar panel program, they hope to create up to 40% of their own energy needs.

At $5,000, the Windspire is certainly low cost, and standing at 30 feet tall and 2 feet wide, offers a sleek propeller free design - a great relief to bird lovers and birds alike. The 30 feet height is also below most residential and urban zoning restrictions, making it ideal for placing on top of blocks of flats - who can share the installation cost whilst benefiting jointly.

Extremely Quiet

The most common complaint from residence living near propeller wind turbine farms is not the destruction of their view, but the annoying noise these turbines produce. The unusually slender design of the Windspire allows it to operate virtually silently thanks to its lower operational speed.

Feel Good Factor

One thing we really like about the Wind Spire at Trade 2 save is that the turbine allows you to wirelessly check your power production at any time, a bit like the Carbon Footprint rating that Trade 2 save will be launching at the end of the year.

The Windspire comes with a 5 year limited warranty and a quote can be obtained from Mariah Power

Prior to trying out what first appears to be an iPhone clone, I have to admit that I am an iPhone user. I think you need to be one to adequately try out the new Blackberry Storm because this is precisely the market that the new Blackberry Storm is going for.

Tens of thousands of previous Blackberry users have flocked to the iPhone since the launch of the 3G iPhone and their recently introduced Enterprise capabilities to rival Blackberry. The Storm is Blackberry’s attempts to stave off Apple’s erosion of these core business customers.

Pros:

It has a lot going for it - battery life twice as long as the iPhone for example. It has GPS as standard, speakers are just as good as the iPhone and as you’d expect comes with the complete business-ready back-end Blackberry infrastructure.

Cons:

The click screen is ghastly!! I don’t care if the reviewers at PhoneScoop or CNET tell me that it just “takes a bit of getting used to”. A clear attempt to try and please everyone - and pleasing no one. Why try and re-invent the wheel? And where’s the WiFi?

When it comes to the interface and navigation, changing from the iPhone to the Blackberry Storm is a bit like dumping your beautiful kind and intuitive girlfriend and dating her ugly dense sister instead.

With the iPhone, total intuitiveness comes as standard. This type of ease of use has always been in Apple’s DNA since the Macintosh Performa days.

I had to spend some time tracking through Blackberry’s instructions to accomplish tasks which should have been straight forward but weren’t. And here’s my point: As a business person, I am busy and don’t have time to try and figure out the workings of another gadget. I need it to work and do the job - seamlessly.

The Blackberry has none of the intuitiveness of the iPhone, nor the navigational ease whilst web browsing is plain clunky.

It’s Blackberry saying to die hard Blackberry loyalist “don’t migrate to the iPhone, we’ve got something similar - without addressing the key issues as to why users are migrating to the iPhone in the first place. Plain and Simple : it is better.

Since the launch of the 1st generation iPhone over a year ago Blackberry have had plenty of time to dissect and scrutinize it to come up with something better. Simply speaking the Storm had to be better - people upgrade to better models, they don’t downgrade to a something less - and the Blackberry Storm is quite simply something less.

At trade 2 save we predict many of these will be sold and automatically handed out as corporate phone contacts get renewed. However, I also predict a lot of them are going to wind up being traded in here and upgraded to an iPhone.

I suspect the main reason for picking a Blackberry Storm over the Apple iPhone 3G is going to be network. If your company runs with Verizon it’s highly unlikely that your IT department is going to switch the entire network simply because you find the click clumsy and the navigation a little sluggish.

trade 2 save will buy pre-owned Blackberry Storms along with Apple iPhones and the full range of other consumer electronics games movies and music. By trading in, other customers can buy these goods from us with a warranty in graded conditions, thereby saving money and reducing the impact the consumer electronics industry has on the environment.

It’s hard to explain in simple terms why Circuit City whimpered quietly into bankruptcy this month, but the root causes go back more than 2 decades. Circuit City appears to have continued with a faltering strategy which major competitors like Best Buy did well to avoid.

Once upon a time, you either bought your electronics, cellphones, games and movies from a retail outlet or on rare occasions through a Direct Mail catalog for a value price.

Then came the internet, with wildly overconfident expectations at first, followed by the bubble bursting, and then a more progressive sea change to sold sales, transforming websites like Amazon from loss leaders into major empires of corporate success.

Sometimes the obvious has to be stated in even more obvious terms. You are Circuit City in the 1980s, and you base your concept upon being able to offer less than retail prices by locating your mega stores in less than convenient places - away from high traffic Mall locations. In the 80s and 90s Circuit City’s strategy worked great - customers did travel those few extra miles, and as the gravy rolled in they quickly expanded the model throughout the US.

However, as consumer purchasing trends changed, so too should have the strategy behind their now 700 outlets and 20,000 employees. Staying still with the same 80s model proved to be both short sited and suicidal.

Their inability to solve fundamentals such as basic inventory management was another nail in a slowly descending coffin. Had the recession not hit them so hard, Circuit City may have gone on for a few more painful  years. If they had possessed a management team less motivated by short term cost cutting, Circuit City may have made the fundamental restructuring necessary to compete with the likes of Amazon and New Egg.

   New Egg is everything that Circuit City should have been in an era of rapidly growing internet electronics sales.

With about 200 employees operating from two 300,000 square foot warehouses on the outskirts of L.A and N.J, New Egg is about as lean as an egg white.

Contrast this with Circuit City’s blubber of 20,000 employees and 700 stores (that’s about 14 million square feet of retail priced real estate) - who do you think is going to be more competitive as more and more customers turned to the convenience of the internet.

As profits began to fail, instead of turning on the key problems of a changing environment, CEO Philip Schoonover decided to turn on his staff instead, replacing key sales staff with cheaper workers. Cutting staff whilst keeping with their traditional strategy also helped to cut customer loyalty.

While New Egg developed their internet site and used offshore programming and database centers in China (Where the very top programmers work for under $5 an hour instead of the average $50 enjoyed in Silicone Valley), Circuit City’s own investment into a more cutting edge e-commerce solution was put aside in favor of a $7 million compensation package to the CEO for his short term cost saving.

When a CEO is awarded options of which the value is directly influenced by short term swings in stock prices, it is hardly surprising that Philip Schoonover and his executives avoided any prickly measures which might damage the value of those stock options.

With hindsight, long term positive measures would have included slashing the 700 stores to perhaps 200 in primer locations alongside rival Best Buy, now the undisputed No.1 electronics retailer. Another positive measure would have been to reinvest Philip Schoonover’s $7M stock options award into a e commerce site which Customers could gravitate to.

Perhaps the most crucial would have been to invest in a state of the art warehouse comparable to Amazon or New Egg, whose low costs enable them to beat their high street competitor. Used as a hub, their crippling inventory management issues would have been solved in an instant.

By ignoring the internet, retailers who rely on offering cheaper prices by locating in secondary tier retail locations are shooting themselves in both feet: On the one hand they lack the convenience of primary tier high street competitors, whilst on the other they cannot hope to compete with internet based giants like Amazon and New Egg, who carve an ever growing market share out of their demise.