You don’t want to miss this Sunday’s episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

You might remember my behind-the-scenes look at Extreme Makeover in Washington, DC last year. Airing on Valentine’s Day, this episode will feature not one, but two remodel projects. And if you’ve seen the show before, you know these remodels are over the course of just seven days. Quite a feat.

Our client, Serious Materials, donated their windows to both projects. What makes these remodels special is that both were built to be as near to net zero energy buildings as possible, meaning near zero net energy consumption and zero carbon emissions annually. The products included to make this happen were SIPs panels provided by Winter Panel, solar electric systems from Aurora Energy, insulated concrete foundation forms from Leep Green, and super-insulating high R-value windows from SeriousWindows.

It’s interesting to see a mainstream, primetime show like Extreme Makeover put the focus on energy-efficiency. Not surprising, though. As we saw at Greenbuild late last year, greenwashing is going out of style. Builders and consumers alike are looking for the most eco-friendly, energy-efficient products out there protect our environment and make buildings as sustainable as possible.

So tune in to ABC this Sunday at 9/8 Central for an episode that will leave you reaching for the hammer and ready to start tackling those home improvement projects. (Oh, and Tyler Perry makes an appearance!)

We’re both celebrating a 20 year milestone this year!

Friday’s USA Today piece is something we hope people say about us as well.

Overachiever — and proud of it.

For 20 years, Vantage has experienced much success, with highlights such as launching Samsung’s first CDMA handsets in the U.S. in 1997, and launching Serious Materials’ first product to the green building market in 2007. Over the past two decades, Vantage has continuously expanded its offerings to meet the demand of the marketplace, most recently including wireless and mobile applications, clean tech, medical devices and social media, adding to our existing practice areas of enterprise/SMB technology, consumer and semiconductors.

While The Simpsons aired their 20th Anniversary episode last night, we’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline to celebrate throughout the whole year. So check back often for details!

Here’s to 20 more GREAT years!

We have finished up our participation in GreenBeat 2009 conference on the Smart Grid.  Vantage Communications was a strategic partner for the event, which provided me with a unique view of a major green conference that I would like to share.

1. “VentureBeat is doing its first green conference. Would Vantage be interested in participating?” Andie Rhyins, Publisher of VentureBeat

Actually, I answered yes, before Andie finished the question.  I knew if VentureBeat was putting together a show, this was a rare opportunity to be part of an important event from the beginning.  As the first GreenBeat event, we had a clean sheet of paper and the opportunity to provide a defining voice for marketing and PR that would help attract attendees, sponsors and speakers. It also was a bit scary knowing that our white board scribble and initial PowerPoints needed to be made into a conference with topics, speakers, attendees and press in very short order.

2. “Fw: Al Gore has agreed to come to GreenBeat” Matt Marshall

This was the header of a late Friday e-mail at the end of August. In less than 10 words, the bar had been raised for everybody. It also meant that we had to rethink our media outreach for the show. You may be asking why a conference run by a highly influential blog needs to do outreach to other media?  Part of the attraction of a conference for high-level speakers is the ability to reach a large number of highly influential people. Approximately 500 people attended GreenBeat in person. However, the number of people that read about the show can be in the hundreds of thousands. While VentureBeat does provide in depth coverage of the show to its readership, it is important to maximize awareness by being seen and heard on multiple channels. Media coverage for GreenBeat inlcuded the New York Times, CNET and Earth2Tech which has an aggregate audience in the millions. Immediately following the show, Techmeme  had VentureBeat ranked #5 of the sources most frequently posted to Techmeme.  This  was a higher ranking than even the New York Times.

3. “My name is Jim Rogers and I’m one of the speakers” Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy

What as particularly impressive about GreenBeat is that despite the large number of high profile speakers and attendees, there was virtually no attitude or hubris. The CEO of Duke Energy attended without entourage, and the above quote is how he introduced himself. He made himself available to anyone who wanted to talk with him. Vinod Khosla was in the lobby for much of the morning available to talk to anyone. In his talk, John Doerr gave his e-mail and invited start ups to send him business plans. I attend many conferences and I never have seen a friendlier conference than GreenBeat. This is a real testament to Matt and the GreenBeat team. I look forward to seeing you at GreenBeat 2010.

Well, we made it! We’re in Phoenix for Greenbuild 2009, and we’ve already seen some exciting new companies and products on the show floor. Plus we shot some great videos for our clients, CALMAC and IES. Here is a video of our first day at the show:

We’ve got two days packed full of meetings and additional video shoots with Serious Materials and YKK AP, and somewhere in there we will head over to see Al Gore deliver the Keynote and Opening Celebration tomorrow night with Sheryl Crow. (And just in case you aren’t here in AZ, you can check out live streams on Greenbuild’s website.)

We are looking forward to meeting green building professionals sharing their visions for the future of the industry, as well as the editors and bloggers who write about it along the way. Melissa Hincha-Ownby of Mother Nature Network has already blogged about the event. Lloyd Alter of Treehugger is here, too. Along with 24,000 registered attendees, according to the records when the show floor opened at 5:30 this evening.

Check back here daily for a round-up of news and views from the show. Next week, we will do a show wrap up. And we’ll be Tweeting live from #Greenbuild09 the rest of the week – follow @catrionaharris, @mariegoltara and @toryk for your green building fix this week.

Recently I attended the Food & Wine Festival at Epcot. While Florida was graced with a cold front, making it enjoyable to walk around without suffocating from humidity, I encountered major network issues with my iPhone.

Not to beat a horse to death, but come on AT&T! Text messages were slow coming through, applications didn’t run smoothly, phone calls were choppy despite having several bars of service and opening web sites – forget about it!? So, not only did the mass amount of people at Epcot make it hard to keep a comfortable bubble of personal space, but they kept me from Tweeting!

CNET recently published an article, “Is the iPhone Hurting AT&T’s brand?” in which Rob Adler, vice president at Vantage, was quoted as saying, “AT&T can say that there is nothing wrong with their network all they want,” he continued. “But when someone is experiencing dropped calls and no access to the 3G network every day, they take it very personally. And it is very frustrating.”

Frustrating enough that after seeing the “iDon’t” ads from Verizon Wireless and reading this article from The New York Times though, I’m starting to wonder if people will sacrifice the Apple brand for Verizon/Google/Motorola Droid.

Just like the Mac vs. PC commercials, Droid’s ads continue to poke fun at Apple. While I wouldn’t give up my Mac at home, frankly, these AT&T network issues are quite a drag and joining Matt Marshall as a soon-to-be Droid user isn’t sounding too shabby! Consumers want reliability in any product they purchase. If you pay $200-$300 for an iPhone, plus the elaborate service plan each month, you want a network that works – and AT&T just isn’t cutting it these days.

While women have made some great strides in the tech world, there’s still a ways to go, as evidenced by Allyson Kapin’s Huffington Post article, “Giving Tech a Bad Name.” Some of the most amazingly gifted people in technology are women. Yet, women are underrepresented, making up only a small percentage of panelists at tech conferences and as go-to people for quotes.

Recently, Vantage Commubications CEO, Ilene Adler took part in a podcast interview with Suzanne Bowen of DIDXchange to explore this very topic about women and the tech industry. The two discussed how each got into working within the tech field and how it affected their lives. The conversation touched on how both women and men should support and encourage each other in order to surpass stereotypes. Also, how women should collaborate and encourage one another so more women can feel comfortable with entering such a dominantly male industry. The bottom line: to change the perception, people—women and men—need to take action and promote women in tech rather than wait for everyone else to change.

The Federal Communications Commission had begun work on a National Broadband Plan, which will benefit citizens and businesses. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act called upon the FCC to submit a national broadband plan to Congress by February 17, 2010 that discusses broadband deployment, adoption, affordability and the use of broadband in relation to education, energy, efficiency, and public safety.

Julius Genachowski, Federal Communications Commission chairman explained at the recent opening broadband workshop that broadband “is to us what railroads, electricity, highways and telephones were to previous generations—a platform for commerce, for democratic engagement, and for helping address major national challenges.”

The plan is to reduce the Digital Divide and bring broadband to nearly 40 percent of Americans not yet served by broadband to the home. In some areas, this figure is as high as 60 percent. The National Broadband Plan will also create jobs, spur innovation and promote competition. 

Technology vendors and service providers have the opportunity to unite the country in this initiative; one which is easily understandable by citizens, the press and legislators and bring the benefits of technology to underserved and un-served areas.  Who knows? Perhaps broadband can be for the early 21st century what putting a man on the moon was in the 1960s—a point of patriotism and progress for the country.

Last week, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition came to Washington, DC. This particular episode of Extreme Makeover featured the remodeling of both a house and a community center/school. I got an all-access, behind-the-scenes pass, thanks to a VIP invite from my client, Serious Materials. Its super-insulating SeriousWindows were selected for use in both projects.

Extreme Makeover’s energy goals for these two projects – a near net-zero home and community center – will provide both the Tripp family and The Fishing School with efficient homes and lower bills. With input and guidance from the Department of Energy (DOE) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a DOE Laboratory, each project was designed with advanced energy-efficient materials and serve as examples for cost-effective near net-zero energy building design.

It was great to see so many people volunteering for an amazing family and an amazing organization right in my backyard. And to see that sustainable design was at the forefront of the project really showed me that green building isn’t just a buzzword; it’s here to stay. One of our friends, Tara Taffera of Door & Window Manufacturer Magazine joined us on-site on Tuesday. You can read her thoughts here. We also met up with Lee Patrick Sullivan of Clean Skies News. Robin Roy, VP of Projects & Policy of Serious Materials, discussed the super-efficient windows with Patrick outside the house on Tuesday.

Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu visited the site of The Fishing School to see the progress of the projects designed with guidance from Chu and his team at the DOE, which will ultimately serve as examples of near net-zero energy buildings.

And while I didn’t meet Ty Pennington, I did meet Paul Dimeo! All in all, a good week!

New technologies are always evolving and changing the way we communicate. According to research from IPG’s Universal McCann and AOL, “One out of every seven minutes of media consumption today takes place via mobile devices…That’s expected to grow by 60 percent over the next two years.” Many of our clients are looking into website redesigns in order to make them more mobile-friendly. It’s interesting to see this shift. No longer is just having a blog good enough. Now it must be mobilized. And in doing so, we are finding that content must be refreshed more frequently, so as not to get lost in the shuffle

MediaPost recently reported on a new survey by Princeton Survey Research International, which found that 90 percent of Internet users between 18 – 29 use video sharing sites, up from 72 percent one year ago. But that’s not all. Online adults ages 30 – 49 also showed big gains over the past year; 67 percent now use video-sharing sites, up from 57 percent in 2008. So we now work with our clients to produce more video content and add pictures and videos to press releases.

Additionally, how we get news and information is changing on a regular (dare I say, daily?) basis. As PR professionals, we focus on people who are influencers. Traditionally, this has been the media or industry analysts. While these folks remain influential, there is a new group of influencers. There are blogs that comment on or repackage the news, some of whom have larger followings than the original content (e.g. Gawker).  People  now regularly forward news to their friends and colleagues via social networks and Twitter.

PR is also an ever-evolving game. Not so long ago, press releases went out via fax. You read that right, fax. That little machine in the corner of the copy room that the interns look at in bewilderment. That was cutting edge. Then came e-mail. Now, as how people get their news is in a state of constant change, we are continually adapting to make sure that we are getting the word out to the right people in the way they want to receive it.  I guess it is not surprising that change has come to news, which after all, is the business of reporting on change.

Earth Day has come and gone, but at Vantage we definitely made the most of the special day. In fact, we started celebrating a week early and how else, but with a party! Actually, 2 parties in 2 cities. On Thursday, April 16 we brought together about 200 business, government and media folks for the Vantage Communications Bi-coastal Earth Day event. Offices in both San Francisco and Orlando celebrated Earth Day with networking, food and giveaways – with all proceeds benefiting the United States Green Building Council.

In San Francisco, at a special one night opening of the Autodesk Gallery, Vantage gathered with influential green individuals to network and share insights. The evening also featured a panel with speakers from the USGBC-NCC, San Francisco’s Green Building, Forbes Magazine, Autodesk, and Serious Materials who discussed “Sustainable Innovation in a Recession.” In case you missed the live streaming of the event, you can watch it here:

Vantage Communications Earth Day Panel

The Orlando green community gathered at the local Taste Restaurant, where a good time was had by all with drinks, savory appetizers and giveaways from local businesses and green companies. An evening of networking included guests from the local USGBC, Green Cities and CoLab Orlando.

For all who joined us, we hope the evening was as fun and meaningful for you as it was for us in making it happen. You also can see photos from the evening here.