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People—Planet—Profits is a triple bottom line business model created by London-based Better Energy Systems. One of the company’s most successful product lines is Solio, which is a line of hybrid electric chargers. They are ‘hybrids’ because Solio chargers use both the Sun and electrical wall sockets to recharge. They are extremely useful and carry an even more extreme sense of corporate responsibility.
“Our goal is to stimulate the imagination of the modern consumer by developing products and methodologies that we hope will broaden our sphere of influence with the mobile consumer, broadening their perception of renewable technology,” complexly reads the Solio product brochure. And while that may seem ‘lofty’ for the typical free marketeer, Solio is as serious about their influence on the world as they are about their products.
Take a moment and search for “Solio on Safari” on YouTube.com and you will find beautiful film footage taken in East Africa. Solio’s Vice President of Sustainability, Dan Porras, takes the solar chargers to villagers, tribesmen and phone entrepreneurs in Africa, where mobile phone technology is growing enormously. Phone entrepreneurs in Africa sell talk time on village phones. One story in the film features one such entrepreneur who lives in a village without electricity. To keep his business going, he is faced with the routine of half a day’s journey to charge his phone, and at an expense. When Porras showed him the Solio solar charger, he replied graciously, “long live Solio”. This story has a message about the boundless reach of mobile communications and the necessity too for solar power. So maybe it’s obvious why I chose Solio as the Editor’s Pick, but contribution to the world is not my only reason for bringing them to your attention. I would have no reason to talk about a product or company, in this context, merely for the sake of its sense of human responsibility.
According to the Specs sheet on the Solio Classic, (pictured lower right), you can replace all of your chargers with one Solio just by changing the tip; charge a phone, PDA, MP3 player or GPS and right out of the box too. Additional tips can be ordered from their website. But storage is impressive too.
The internal battery stores power for up to one year. A fully charged Solio Classic will charge a typical mobile phone twice or give over 15 hours of MP3 music. 1 hour of Sun = 15 min talk time or 40 min of MP3 music. The hybrid chargers take about eight hours to charge in the sun and two in a wall socket.
For dealer information go to http://www.solio.com. Also view an interview with Dan Porras on the CTIA 2008 Interviews tab on this website and scroll to Better Energy Systems.