Archive for August, 2010

Advisory Board

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

Matt Flannery
Matt Flannery is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kiva. Kiva’s online platform allows individuals to connect with and lend as little as $25 to micro-entrepreneurs in the developing world. Matt began developing Kiva in late 2004 as a side-project with while working as a computer programmer at TiVo, Inc. In December 2005 Matt left his job to devote himself to Kiva full-time. As CEO, Flannery has led Kiva.org’s growth from a pilot project to an established online service with partnerships in more than 30 countries and over $3 million loaned. Prior to starting Kiva.org, Flannery spent time in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya filming stories of microbusinesses started by Village Enterprise Fund. Matt is a Draper Richards Fellow, Skoll Awardee and Ashoka Fellow. He graduated with a BS in Symbolic Systems and a Masters in Philosophy from Stanford University.

<img src="http://005845a.netsolhost.com/ecoReserveWP/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Jane-Goodall-150×150.png" alt="" title="Jane Goodall" width="150" height="150" Cheap Jerseys class=”alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-1245″ />Jane Goodall, Ph.D.
Dame nfl jerseys china Jane Morris Goodall, DBE, is a British primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace. Considered to be the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 45-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. In 1977, Goodall established Kaiser the Cheap Jerseys Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), which supports the Gombe research, and she is a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. With nineteen offices around the world, the JGI is widely recognized for innovative, community-centred conservation and development programs in Africa. Its global youth program, Roots & Shoots began in 1991 and now has over 10,000 groups in over 100 countries. Today, Goodall devotes virtually all of her time to advocacy on behalf of chimpanzees and the environment, travelling nearly 300 days a year. She obtained cheap nhl jerseys a Ph.D. in Ethology in 1965 from Cambridge University.

Healy Hamilton, Ph.D.
Dr. Healy Hamilton is a biodiversity scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Geography at San Francisco State University. She is the founding director of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Informatics, a program that integrates biological and geospatial data for biodiversity research, conservation and education. The Center’s focus is on the developing field of Conservation Biogeography, which investigates geographic patterns of biodiversity in the past, present, and future. Dr. Hamilton received her masters degree from Yale University’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and her Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. For both degrees she conducted extensive field research in Latin America. Dr. Hamilton is a former U.S. Fulbright Fellow and a Switzer Foundation Environmental Leadership Grantee.

Daniel Hunt Janzen, Ph.D.
Dr. Daniel Janzen is the DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been since 1976, and he is also Technical Advisor to Area de Conservación Guanacaste in northwestern Costa Rica, a project he conceived and initiated in the early 1970s. Guanacaste is probably the oldest, largest and most successful habitat restoration project in the world (1.430 km²), located just south of the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border. Dr. Janzen also serves as long-time advisor to the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio), a research organisation in Costa Rica that is inventorying, cataloguing and describing the country’s gigantic natural endowment. Since 1965, he has lectured annually at the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a consortium of several North American and Costa Rican universities. He has also taught at University of Kansas, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, and at universities in Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Dr. Janzen obtained his B.Sc. degree from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mark Pincus
Mark Pincus is the Founder, CEO & Chief Product Officer at Zynga. He founded the company in 2007 to enable users to build social connections through games. On his way to Zynga, Mark started three companies. In 2003, he launched Tribe.net, one of the first social networks in the industry. Before that, he founded Support.com and built the company into a leading providing of support automation software and took it public. In 1995, he launched FreeLoader, the first web-based consumer push company, and sold it a few months later. Mark started his career working in traditional media, financial services, and venture cheap oakleys capital before he discovered his calling as a consumer techbology entrepreneur. Mark graduated summa cum laude from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is an angel investor to multiple Silicon Valley startups and regularly gives lectures to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Board of Directors

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

Colin Wiel – Chairman, CEO & Founder
Colin Wiel is the Founder & CEO of ecoReserve. He is a successful high-tech entrepreneur, investor and committed environmentalist. Colin’s passion for rainforest protection led him to purchase land in the Mamoni Valley in Panama, where he then conceived of ecoReserve as a vehicle for enabling individuals of any means to create their own nature reserves. He is also Co-Founder and Managing Director of Wiel Brien, LLC, a real estate investment company focused on buying, renovating, and leasing REO single family homes. Colin has a strong background in business management and software engineering. In 1998, he founded and ran Milo, a 35-person software engineering firm in San Francisco that was acquired within three years. He then founded the San Francisco Chapter of the Fake Ray Bans Keiretsu Forum, an angel investor network. Colin has made angel investments in more than a dozen Bay Area companies in the past six years. Earlier in his career, Colin designed an antiskid system for commercial aircraft for Boeing (two US patents issued) and co-architected the Java infrastructure for Charles Schwab’s online trading website, which was the largest dollar volume Karabiner e-commerce website in the world at that time. Colin holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering cheap jordans online from U.C. Berkeley.

Steve Brown
Steve Brown is an entrepreneur and active board member in innovative software and Internet businesses. He is currently CEO of Snaptic Inc., a mobile applications company that makes it easier to capture and share information from mobile devices to improve productivity, manage resources, and connect with services online. Prior to co-founding Snaptic in October 2008, Steve was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, where he pursued opportunities to apply Internet technologies and services to empower consumers and encourage healthier lifestyles. He also joined the board of Breastfeeding.com, where he helped transform the company into a social network and then managed its acquisition by The Knot (NASDAQ:KNOT), a leading lifestage media company. He currently serves on the board of Agile Sports Technologies, a world-class online video coaching platform used by leading sports teams. Steve is the founder and former CEO of Health Hero Network, a pioneer of telehealth and remote patient monitoring, now a division of Robert Bosch GmbH. Steve Brown earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Stanford University in 1991. In his honors thesis on modeling climate change, he created educational simulations to teach people about the impact of lifestyle and behavior on global warming. Steve speaks at international conferences about innovation and the potential for the Internet and interactive media to positively change behavior. Steve’s innovations have resulted in 70 US patents and numerous industry awards.

Sean Jacobsohn
Sean Jacobsohn has been an alliances and sales executive in the technology-enabled business services space since 1999. He is currently VP of Channel Management at Cornerstone OnDemand, a human capital management software-as-a-service provider, which has grown from 300,000 to 3.3 million subscribers during his tenure. Previously Sean was VP Sales and Partner Development at WageWorks, a leading provider of consumer-directed spending solutions, which grew from $3 million to $82 million in revenue during his 4 year tenure. He spent 3.5 years at Elance, the world’s largest marketplace of contractors, which sold its software unit to cheap oakleys Click Commerce (CKCM). He also has held finance positions at Major League Baseball and The Prudential Realty Group. Sean has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BBA in Marketing, Finance, and International Business from University of Wisconsin. He is a co-founder of the Harvard Angels, board member of ecoReserve, and the immediate past President of the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California.

Arch Meredith
Arch Meredith is Managing Partner of Kite Hill Capital, a private venture capital firm. Arch is also a Founder of the Chroma Group, which developed patented software technology for pattern recognition and visualization, and he manages Chroma Group equity interests. One of Chroma’s affiliates is applying the technology to find subtle patterns in seismic data that are diagnostic of oil and gas, another is using it to help radiologists screen for colon cancer in CT data (for virtual colonoscopies), and a third is using it to find new indications for existing drugs. Previously, Arch was Founder & CEO of TeleTix, which developed the first networked, self-serve kiosks in cooperation with Hewlett-Packard. He is a graduate of Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Lee West
Lee West is a Founding Board Member wholesale football jerseys of ecoReserve and serves on the Finance and Educational Committees of the Executive Council. Lee is the Co-Founder and Chairman of the San Francisco Carbon Collaborative (“SFCC”), an initiative on behalf of the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to develop technologies and market-based responses to climate change and make San Francisco the west coast hub for carbon markets. Lee has applied his almost 30-year career in financial markets and private investing into advisory roles and board appointments in various technology, financial services, and non-profit related businesses. He began his career in money management in 1982 working for Wall Street firms and heading advisory services. Today Lee cheap jerseys is President of Defensive Portfolio Management (“DPM”), where he continues to manage capital for institutional clients.

Founding Donors Wall of Fame

Monday, August 16th, 2010

It is with great pleasure that ecoReserve would like to thank and acknowledge the following Founding Donors who provided our early stage support. These visionary, angel contributors helped us take micro-conservation from a dream to a reality. We couldn’t have done it without your encouragement and generous support!

Founding Angels Circle: $25,000+

The Wiel Family<br cheap oakleys />
Organic to (in-kind)
O’Melveny & Myers (in-kind)
People Connect Staffing (in-kind)
QuickStart Global (in-kind)
Lee West Companies (in-kind)

Game-Changers Circle: $10,000-$24,999

Anonymous (2)
36Branding (in-kind)
Steve & Patty Brown
David & Lowe Chang
Edward Conrads
The Mapstead Family
Arch & Shelly Meredith
Natembea Foundation
Lee & Kimberly West Family

Visionaries Circle: $5,000-$9,999

Anonymous<br Cheap Football Jerseys />
Steve & Patty Brown
Marin Community Foundation

Influencers Circle: $2,500-$4,999

Sean Jacobsohn
Salesforce Foundation

Momentum Builders Circle: $1,000-$2,499

Anonymous
Margaret Duskin/Cushman Wakefield (in-kind)
Susan Hailey
Porter Family Foundation
Robin Venturelli

Early Adopters Circle: $100-$999

Anonymous (7)<br cheap oakleys />
Douglas Allan
Sophie Bain
The Beebe Family
BioInnovation
Susan Blew & Denis wholesale nfl jersyes Puglisi
Credo Mobile
Martha & Don Dolben
Edwards-Fleischer Family
Gottsman-Kessler Family
Charlie Graham
Joshua & Kendra Haims
Elizabeth Harshaw
Melissa Hillis
Lee Howard
Jeff Lee Cypress Properties Group
Kyle & Liz Keogh
Benjamin Kersey
Daniel Kraft, M.D.
Lisa Kruger
James Lynch, Jr.
Charlot & Greg Malin Cheap Jordan Shoes (in-kind)
Fran Meredith
Murphy Vineyards (in-kind)
PaperCulture.com
Laura & Woody Rea
Dr. Melvin Reich
Tim Sartoris
The Scott Family
Valerie Steele/Sotheby’s (in-kind)
Viader (in-kind)
The Verner Family
Carl Wescott & Monette Stephens
Rebecca Westerfield
Grace (Hsu) Woo & Family
Rona Yang & Gary Chevksy (in-kind)
Bradley Zlotnick

Friends: $1-$99

Anonymous (4)
Denise Blackwell-Burns
Darby Charvat
Mike Corbera
Raven Davis-King
Peter de Zordo
Erik Eklof
The Giles Family
Puneet Gupta
Julia & Leo Horvath
William C. Lewis
James Lynch, III
Rebecca Morris
OneCleanWorld Foundation
Laura Roden
Sustainability Education Network

ecoReserve Alpha Site is Launched! Beta Up Next!

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

We’re pleased to announce that we now have an alpha version of the ecoReserve website! This is a private site that we’re testing internally but here’s a screenshot of what the *real* Panamanian rainforest looks like!

On the alpha site, you can see all of the available conservation and restoration reserve parcels in the Panamanian rainforest that you’ll help to protect. You can click on the interactive map to adopt your own nature reserve, and your personalized ecoReserve page will display your profile, a portfolio of parcels that you’ve adopted, multimedia content that you’ve uploaded, and messages from your friends. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be refining the alpha site and adding features.

We are now in the final push to launch the public Beta version of the website in the next few weeks.

We will be refining the alpha site and adding several exciting social networking features that will enable micro-conservation to spread rapidly among friends.

We are almost there but we need to raise an additional $20,000 in the next few weeks to launch the site. If just 200 friends like you donate $100 today, we’ll make our goal within 24 hours. Would you please be one of those 200 friends?

If you donate any amount before our Beta launch, you will become one of our Founding Donors honored on the Wall of Fame, and you’ll secure a respected place in ecoReserve’s startup history.

Thank you for your good wishes and support this year. We couldn’t do it without you!

If you’re on Facebook, click here to donate throughCauses.

If you’re not on Facebook, click here to donate through Givezooks.

Chocó-Darien Hotspot

Friday, August 6th, 2010

ecoReserve’s first reserve located in the Mamoni Valley is part of the Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena Hotspot and includes a small portion of the Chocó/Darién wet region, one of the two major regions in the hotspot.

ecoReserve’s Mamoni Valley reserve falls in two of the 34 internationally recognized biodiversity hotspots: 1) the Mesoamerica Biodiversity Hotspot and 2) the Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena Hotspot. Although both start in Panama, the Mesoamerica Biodiversity Hotspot runs northward, but the Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena Hotspot runs southward. Because we have already discussed the Mesoamerica Biodiversity Hotspot, this post will focus on the Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena Hotspot. The Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena Hotspot starts in the southeastern portion of Mesoamerica and extends to the northwestern corner of South America with a reach of 1600 kilometers, which is close to 1000 miles. The hotspot is divided into two main regions, the northernmost Chocó/Darién wet and moist forests located in the Darién Province in Panama and the Chocó region in western Colombia to the southernmost Tumbesian dry forests of Ecuador and the northwestern part of Peru.

The Darién Province is one of the most diverse, remote regions in Central America and is protected by dense pristine forests and jungle. At over 3 million acres, it is the largest province in Panama, the most sparsely populated, and the least well known. It is a region of dense tropical rainforest and is among the most complete ecosystems of all tropical America. The Darién is mostly uninhabited mountains, jungle, and swamplands, and it has one of the richest ecosystems of the American tropics. It is also home to many endangered species, such as the jaguar, the giant anteater, the harpy eagle, and the tapir.

Until 20 years ago, there were no roads in the Darién, and travel through the region was very difficult. Before the roads were built, the indigenous people of the area, the Embera, Wounaan, and Kuna, relied mainly on water transportation because they live in settlements scattered along the river valley . Today the Pan-American Highway cuts through the middle of Darien. This gravel highway extends down as far as the town of Yaviza, which is the beginning of the famed Darien Gap. This 100 km gap, which is the only uncompleted piece of the the Pan-American Highway, is impossible for travelers to pass and survive. The highway poses another danger as well. Because the highway connects overland commerce between North and South America, it has opened up the region to cattle ranchers, loggers, and landless peasants. As a result, both the natural forest and the indigenous people of the Darién are being threatened.

The biggest objection to completion of the highway is its effect on the region’s ecological balance and the danger it poses to the survival and habitat of the indigenous people living in the region. It would also extend the already dramatic deforestation of the area.