YOU Could be the Next Big Thing in the Green Gadget Industry
by Jaymi Heimbuch, San Francisco, California 
on 12. 8.08
Photo of what your desk could look like as you're inventing the next most amazing green gadget via saschapohflepp
With two new gadget design competitions coming up, you could be the next big thing to hit the green gadget industry if you put on your thinking cap!
Greener Gadgets is looking for your entry and gadget design that addresses major environmental issues like energy use, toxicity, and more, and is dangling $3,000 in front of you as a nice fat carrot.
Or, if you’re more into figuring out cool uses of OLED technology, the CombOLED Project has something right up your alley.
Read on for more about these competitions and how you can get involved in changing the electronics industry.
About Greener Gadgets Design Competition:
Create the greenest blueprint solving issues behind energy, carbon footprint, health and toxicity, product lifestyle or social development. No easy task, but we’re calling on students, emerging designers, and even you seasoned firms out there to bring us your budding new ideas and most verdant developments...The top 50 entries will be published online for voting and comment.
You'll earn bucks and clout by letting your brain run away with a green idea!
About the OLED Design Competition:
The new “OLED Design Contest – CombOLED Edition” is now ready to give you the opportunity to rule your lighting future shaping applications using unique low-cost transparent OLED devices. This contest is opened to everybody from students to professionals with the aim to help you express your revolutionary vision of light. You’ll have the chance to win a consistent award and, more than that, to have your ideas realized as demonstrator from the Consortium partners.
Design categories include mood lighting, static signage, and low-content information display. Check out their PDF brochure for more.
So, if you're bored or a budding inventor, here are a couple shots for you to make a difference in green technology and get rewarded for it.
More on Green Competitions:
Urban Re:Construct Competition Challenges Designers to Rethink the City Block
Design Competition: A Commuter Bike for the Masses
Languages Matter! UNESCO Design Competition To Promote Linguistic Diversity
3rd Living Steel Competition: And the Winner Is...
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My desk has looked like that for a long time but I have recently decided that I cannot be the next big thing. Years of pursuing gadgets to make my life easier has lead no where. I'm not happier, and my life is only more complicated. Additionally I have a closet full of gadgets that I've bought or made that are really useless. They all add up to money and resources wasted which is why I think that the greenest gadget is no gadget at all. Lots of people will still go buy crap they don't need though so I guess its better that it is more friendly to the earth.
In addition to OLED check out Kent Displays. They have a product similar to eink (but you can actually buy displays from them in less than qty million). They only require power to change the display so they use almost no power. They are slow to update so no good for video but great for books.