LovelyCompanies.com

Organic, fresh and delicious.  At last, I have found a company who puts their money where their mouth is.  They succeed where other baby food manufacturers have failed.

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I have given up following people around turning off lights and being generally “annoying” about consumption. The problem is not a lack of desire to do the right thing (as so often reported in the papers) but more a lack of knowledge of what I can actually do myself.

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Paul Graham, founder of ycombinator, discusses the value of benevolence when working with tech startups.

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In case you haven’t come across iFixit before, they’re a relatively small startup that offer detailed electronics teardowns, DIY repair guides and all the tools you’d need to do them. Basically, they’re aim is to put the power back in the hands of the consumer, when it comes to the maintenance and repair of personal electronics.

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Here’s a round-up of all the posts from the LovelyCompanies.com blogroll that I’ve starred recently in my Google Reader. Feedback on this experimental post format is very welcome!

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In the last year, SuperJam boss Fraser Doherty has held over 120 Tea Parties bringing elderly people together and helping them make friends (previous coverage: here and here). Just recently, Fraser’s efforts were rewarded at the ‘Bighearted Scotland Awards’ where he scooped a specially created award as Scotland’s Young Business Person of the Year. The [...]

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Beautiful World is a London-based agency for charities, non-profits and ‘any organization that does the world some good’. The three founding partners of the company each bring their speciality to the mix giving clients a neat blend of strategy, creative and data. Where traditional agencies might be all about old-school print media, these guys are [...]

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Let’s talk about nappies. Half a ton of nappies, actually. A year’s worth of disposable nappies for just one baby. Because babies poo. A lot.
Big-brand manufacturers seem to ignore the environmental impact of disposable nappies. This is very concerning. But disposable nappies are so convenient! What’s a parent [...]

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Earlier in the year I met up with a local lovely company. Hailing from the Team Valley Trading Estate in nearby Gateshead, EthicalSuperstore.com sells thousands of different groceries, gifts and gadgets from their easy-to-use website. I had a chat with founder and CEO Andy Redfern and he showed me round their offices and warehouse.
For a [...]

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The Alamo Drafthouse, a cinema in Austin, Texas, know that they’re in the entertainment industry. From time to time they have what they call ‘Signature Events’.
These events include ‘Renegade Karaoke’:

…and a secret world-premiere of the new Star Trek film:

There’s more info over on the Church of the Customer Blog but here’s the bottom line:
Fun is [...]

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Social websites run by lovely companies often have lovely communities. One of the earlier social websites with a lovely community that was kind, friendly and helpful, was Flickr.
Last week Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake announced her latest project – Hunch.com – with a delightful blog post.
Hunch is a decision-making site, customized for you. Which means Hunch [...]

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SuperJam, a company we covered last month, is today celebrating the second anniversary of launching their products in Waitrose!
In the last couple of years they have launched in more than 1,000 stores, been named one of Scotland’s top innovations and set up a project running hundreds of tea parties for thousands of lonely elderly people [...]

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Email marketing is now quite a crowded market with hundreds of companies touting their various solutions. However one company that has consistently floated to the top of the pack for the last few years is Campaign Monitor.
They describe themselves as “email marketing software for designers” and count many lovely companies, such as MOO and [...]

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I’ve been meaning to write about Graze for some time now and today there are some discount codes floating about on Twitter so, if you’re quick, you can read about the product and try it for free!
The idea behind Graze is simple. Delicious, healthy food, delivered straight to your desk at work. You can choose [...]

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I just spotted these lovely iPod speakers on Twitter (thanks Phil) and thought I’d share them!
They’re made by a company called Speakal and they come in a handful of funky designs – iPig, iPanda and iBoo – but they’re not just a pretty face… They produce 25 watts through five speakers and a subwoofer [...]

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We first wrote about Litmus almost a year ago when they gave all their users a Christmas present: a free lifetime account for stats package CrazyEgg worth $9/month.
Litmus is a web app that helps you make sure that the website you are making looks just right in all the various web browsers. The guys [...]

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“Fraser Doherty always loved jam.” So starts the blurb on his website Superjam.co.uk. When Fraser (”Jam boy”) was 14, his Gran shared her jam secrets with him and after developing the healthiest jam recipe he could, he pitched the idea to the supermarkets. Soon his Superjam range was flying off the shelves!
Since launching [...]

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Etsy is an online marketplace for handmade goods. It’s a fine example of a thriving community website and it’s also a very successful business: in 2008, transactions on the site totalled $100m!
Check out Loic Le Meur’s interview with Etsy CEO Robert Kalin below. Robert talks about the origins of the site, how many the [...]

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An OWL arrived at LovelyCompanies.com HQ over Christmas and I thought it was worthy of a quick review…
The OWL is a nifty little mobile device that you can put anywhere in your house and it displays your current electricity usage in a couple of different units including pence/hour and kg of greenhouse gas/hour.  A little [...]

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Gary Vaynerchuk spoke at FOWA Miami 2008 about the importance of the community in building a business. Check out his talk here:

I just searched for previous articles about Gary on LovelyCompanies.com to link to and, to my horror, I couldn’t find any! I will definitely tell you more about this wonderful guy soon. [...]

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