Press

Green Pages launches world’s first green community site – March 2011

It started with a dream to connect the sustainability movement. The Green Pages site – which once was a directory with daily news updates – has re-invented itself. It has now become a community utility for the green movement.

The site currently has around 15,000 members, allowing members to contribute to the news, campaings and events content of the site. It is quite a different model to most news and blog style site which employ journalists to write articles. Its a bit like a community notice board that posts the latest in everything green – straight from the source.

The most innovative model the company has undertaken is to bring in the not for profit environmental advocacy movement as the main providers of news content. ‘We are creating an aggregate for advocacy based environmental news. I believe it is a very much needed resource and has not been done before on a large scale, so I think we’re on the cusp of what could be a very exciting and necessary new resource.’ says Katie Patrick, CEO and founder.

As the platform has come from a directory background, there is a strong focus on quantification of environmental data within the new directory listings. ‘I am very interested in environmental data and third party accreditations. The directory pages allow green companies to fill out their environmental data and show off the logos of their accreditations. I would like to incorporate full life-cycle-analysis data in the future, but it will take some time for the industry to have this data’.

There is a new unsolved precipice of ‘identity management’ on the web. Green Pages hopes to bring something useful to whatever will emerge with how people communicate or track their ‘green identity’.

Goodbye Print, Hello World: Green Pages abandons print media to become tech start up – January 2011

The slippery slope of declining print media spending and newsagent sales was all too clear for environmental media entrepreneur, Katie Patrick. “As soon as I saw the ipad, I decided that I would never print a publication again”. After spending a month in Silicon Valley in 2010, she was blown away by the exciting technology start up scene and decided to go full steam into it.

Over the course of 2009 and 2010, more than 20 publications in Australia alone have ceased to exist. The decline has been quite remarkable, with printing presses closing down and sales plummeting.

‘There was a small window in history when a business like the Green Pages publications could have existed – a time when many large companies were producing green advertising campaigns, the media was thick with green hype and the print advertising dollars were there. stated Ms Patrick.

‘It was a little sad to see the end of Green Pages Annual Directory as it was such a successful and high quality product, but I was very lucky to be able to do some great work during that time and I’m just so excited now about what we can do digitally’. As part of creating a nexus between the print publications and the new green community site, Katie is creating a subscription based ipad app so readers can access all of the historic publications via the tablet.

The hard part was that she was a graduate of environmental engineering, not software engineering and had to spend 6 months knuckled down, learning how to code. ‘It was like going back to high school and starting at the very beginning’.

‘I see the future of what we can do to support the green movement with technology as just the tip of the iceberg, and it is a very exciting place to be. The next age is that of socially enabled technology, identity management and data.”