2010 is turning out to be an incredible year for Sustainable Minds. We recently found out that Sustainable Minds has been nominated as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer Candidate for 2011.

The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world. It’s motto is 'entrepreneurship in the global public interest.’ The WEF engages world leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas and is well known by its annual meeting in Davos in January every year.

Technology companies are starting to understand that sustainability is increasingly important to their customers. But as a consumer, how do you measure ‘green-ness’ across products that are sourced all over the world, and are combinations of processes that include hundreds of vendors? Recently, Greenpeace announced its ranking of 18 electronics companies at the Consumer Electronics Show (what better place?), along with a point-by-point breakdown of how they arrived at their scores. Categories include chemicals management , PVC-free and/or BFR-free models, voluntary take-back, use of recycled plastic content, and eleven more. This year, the leaders are Apple, Sony Ericsson and Nokia. Trailing the pack are Nintendo, Microsoft and Lenovo.
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Following on the heels of Release 1.0, we've made it easier for more people to find out, learn about and subscribe to Sustainable Minds. In this release:

• Educator and student subscriptions
• Affiliate referral program
• Software enhancements

Educator and student subscriptions
As part of the Designers Accord community, and as 'Summit Sponsor' of the Global Summit on Design Education & Sustainability, we are committed to helping educators create undergraduate, graduate and professional development curriculum to integrate environmental sustainability into design, engineering and business programs.

When you launch a new product, it’s not as though you don’t know what people will think. You’ve already taken a lot of time working with your customers to get it right.

At Sustainable Minds, we’ve spent the better part of three years making it our business to understand what product design teams need in order to help them create more environmentally sustainable products.

Nonetheless, we’ve been delighted at the positive results we’re hearing from all sorts of practitioners – from product designers to engineering teams (the un-staged photo of product designers trying out Sustainable Minds software above was taken at our Boston workshop on November 11). Now that we’ve launched R1.0, it’s great to hear that others think we got it right.

Take a look at this blog post by Kenneth Wong, a contributing editor for Desktop Engineering magazine. He attended a recent Sustainable Minds workshop in San Francisco.