Alameda Bicycle

If you are looking for bike store around town, I suggest Alameda Bicycle. I bought my first road bike from them recently and have been very impressed by the service and the very knowledgeable and helpful staff.  Apart from supporting a local business, their “free adjustments for ever” offer is simply unbeatable.

And, as reported recently in the Journal, they are very actively involved in the community as well!

The bike shop has started a reading rewards program, called Books 4 Bikes, that benefits five of Alameda’s elementary schools. The program encourages children to get excited about reading by giving them a raffle ticket to win bicycle-related prizes, such as a new helmet, for each 150-minute reading scorecard they complete; those who submit the most cards stand a chance of winning a new bike.

“I have seen the future, and it’s in Alameda”

An earlier post mentioned an Alameda company (Squid Labs) that was involved in the “one laptop per child” program. Turns out that one of the founders of Squid Labs (Saul Griffith) has just won a MacArthur Fellowship which is also referred to as “genius grant” by the press.

Interesting profile on Saul Griffith and Squid Labs:

The workshop at Squid Labs is a window into a world that will soon be available to the rest of us. Saul and his Squid Labs colleagues can, in the words of MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld, “make (almost) anything”. They have assembled state of the art equipment for rapid prototyping as well as a more traditional machine shop. Much as a programmer assumes the malleability of bits, the unlimited potential of the computer to reshape itself to the maker’s vision, this new generation of hacker assumes that the world itself is malleable, and if Saul’s thesis work is correct, ultimately programmable.

…

I have seen the future, and it’s in Alameda.

It is very encouraging to see such innovative work being done literally in your backyard! Congratulations to Saul and his team at Squid.

Directions via phone … from an Alameda company

An Alameda company (Dial Directions) is offering the ability to receive free driving directions via text messages. The Chronicle is reporting:

Users call (347) 328-4467 from a cell phone and begin explaining where they want to go, either an address or an intersection. The voice recognition service discerns your intended location and asks where you’re coming from.

The system is smart enough to search for nearby cities, just in case you’re uncertain where you’re headed. And it can understand where you’re going, even if you don’t know whether your intended location is a street, road or boulevard. Before the call is over, Dial Directions will have sent you a text message with simplified directions supplied through MapQuest.

I just checked it out and it works flawlessly

OLPC: The Alameda Connection

OLPC, aka One Laptop Per Child is a non-profit project with a goal to provide 100 million laptops over the next couple years to school kids in the developing world. To put this in perspective, 100m is double today’s annual laptop production!

For a project of this size and scope, the design logistics are staggering. Given that the intended audience is predominantly located in the developing world, providing a reliable source of electricity to operate the laptop becomes of paramount importance. One of the solutions being implemented was designed by a local Alameda design firm: Squid Labs, which has since spun off a separate company (Potenco) to commercialize the product.

Thinking locally

I’ve just finished reading Big Box Swindle and there are a number of examples of how some cities have gone about promoting their independent stores.

Austin has an annual event called Austin Unchained. Held on a Saturday in November, this is a call to residents to shop only at locally owned business for the day. This gave them the opportunity to talk about the value of independent business and the economic implications of spending money at locally owned businesses. In the case of Austin, the impact of shunning the chains for local stores for a day was $14m.

A free and widely available directory of local businesses, organized by category. The guide identifies alternatives to chain stores and is also loaded with facts about the economic and community contributions of locally owned businesses.

Raleigh offers a discount card that sells for $25 and provides a year’s worth of discounts at locally owned businesses.

Webster Pharmacy: Last Man Standing

Continuing the occasional series on local businesses, I came across this article that talks about Webster Pharmacy being the city’s only independent corner drug store.

After graduating, Ed Clark came to California and started work at Alameda Drug in 1965. He purchased Webster Street Pharmacy in 1973, the same year he bought his house. He recalls Alameda was home to 15 or 16 independent drugstores at the time.

Today, the business owner surrounds himself in history. Old photographs, faded medical reference books and vintage pharmaceutical containers can be found in his shop. Clark is well-versed in the history of pharmacies and famous people, such as Ben Franklin and playwright Henrik Ibsen, who started out as apothecaries. But behind the counter, he uses the latest technology to fill and track prescriptions. Reference materials once on printed page are now found online, and Clark stays up to date by attending pharmacist conferences.

Clark is also a frequent contributor to the Alameda Sun and maintains an archive of his articles.

A way to shrug off spills

A recent NYT article features a local Alameda company that manufactures clothing based on nanotechnology.

Contourwear, a women’s clothing maker in Alameda, Calif., uses a Schoeller fabric with a NanoSphere coating for its Anywear pants ($156). Neide Cooley, of Breckenridge, Colo., wore a pair of these pants, she said, for ”10 days straight all over Peru.” A serious adventure traveler, Ms. Cooley, who is retired, will soon take along her Anywear pants on a three-week horse-and-camel-riding trip to Mongolia with ”a group of cowgirl friends,” she said. (They plan to ride the camels in the Gobi desert.) The pants, which come in brown, black, green and charcoal, have coin pockets at the hip and passport pockets hidden at both ankles.

These pants look and feel like most others, but the ingenious finish on the fabric is different: it is made of tiny, nanosized particles that repel water, ketchup, honey, blood, vinaigrette and a thousand other potential indignities. With such a surface, if coffee is spilled on you, it just beads up or runs off. The pants can be wiped with a paper napkin — even the skimpy cocktail kind handed out on airplanes — leaving the material dry and unscathed.

Admittedly, the price is a bit steep. But being able to wear the same pants for 10 days without it showing any traces of grime and smell is a huge advantage and makes packing a breeze (adios to checked in baggage?)

Alameda Shade Shop

The first in an occasional series of posts chronicling local businesses.

A family owned business, Alameda Shade Shop has been around since 1949. While they stock a wide variety of interior window offerings, perhaps their specialty is the handcrafted roller shades that are manufactured onsite in the store. Having seen many samples of their work scattered all around the island, I decided to outfit my home with their shades and was impressed by their attention to detail and the impeccable customer service.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way to Alameda Shade Shop other than a satisfied customer.