When we talk about solar power its usually on a big scale: heating buildings, powering transportation and the like.  But we often forget that most of our first experiences with the technology were with a simple machine: the calculator. Well, if like ExchangeMyPhone, you are nostalgic for the old days of solar simplicity, you’re in luck. Solar energy is currently trickling back into this scaled-down objects and more people are looking to the sun to run appliances like the iPad.

Apple may not (yet) be selling the iSun power source, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait for them. In fact, the market for providing alternative energy to small electronics is growing quickly and there are a number of options out there for the iPad in particular. So, to save you the guess work, ExchangeMyPhone brings you the Cadillac of solar power iPad cases: The KudoCase.

Not only can you charge your KudoCase in natural or artificial light, but it automatically tops off the built in battery power so you can go up to ten days before plugging in. The case also charges USB supported accessories like iPhones, and it comes with an HDMI cable for connecting your iPad to a computer monitor or television screen. Unlike some other solar chargers out there made from environmentally harmful materials, the sleek case is made from biodegradable corn plastic: this may sound like a Portlandia reference but we’re not kidding.

And, just for brownie points, KudoCase engineeres included a locator device that beeps when you whistle so you don’t have to tear your room apart when you misplace your iPad. For a case that does so much, we think it is a pretty brilliant deal at $189.95. What do you think?

What happens to hotel soap? Chances are you have never considered the question. In a world with so much waste small, half-used soap bars heading to landfills are at the bottom of most of our lists for concern.  But when you really think about it, landfills are so overwhelming, not because there is an immense amount of trash from a single source, but because millions of little products add up very quickly.  So, maybe soap bars do matter.

Well Shawn Seipler and Paul Till, the founders of Orlando start-up Clean the World certinally belive they do.  It was during a hotel stay that the fate of the half-used soap bar caught Seipler’s attention and he called down to the front office to ask what would happen to it.  The answer was that it would be thrown away. In large hotel chains that results in “a huge amount of trash,” Seipler said. “But what could we do with it?”

The two partners found their answer in a two pronged, non-profit approach which aims to a) divert soap from landfills and b) provide soap to those that need it.  As a result of this innovative thinking, each day thousands of used soap bars are collected by hotel staff, sent to processing centers, sterolized and reshaped into new bars: greatly decreasing the waste produced in soap production. Clean the world is currently partnered with hotels like Walt Disney Hotels and Starwood, and just established a parnetship with InterContinental Hotels Group.  Now that’s a ton of soap.

And it really is making a difference. Through the distribution of recycled soaps, as well as other donated hygiene products, Clean the World is working to prevent the  millions of deaths caused by proventiable, hygiene-related diseases occurring every day.  In April, several representatives of the comany headed to Guatemala where they distributed nearly 13,000 bars of recycled soap to many of the 20,000 individuals living on the edge of city dumps who are at high risk for contracting hygine-related illnesses, as they depend on what they find in the dumps for their survival.

At ExchangeMyPhone we love how Clean the World is rolling up their sleeves to save the environment and improve the quality of life for many.  We love to see other small companies find their niche in the recycling world!

Have you heard of Kickstarter? For those who haven’t, Kickstarter is a crowd-funding platform that lets startups raise money from everyday people. The startup sets a goal, you donate however much you want and then, once they have reached their goal, they start making it a commercial reality.

Now let me introduce the Pebble smart-watch.

In the words of the company’s founder, 25 year old Eric Migicovsky, “Pebble is the first watch built for the 21^st century”. Essentially Pebble connects to iPhone and Android smartphones using Bluetooth, alerting you with a silent vibration to incoming calls, emails and messages. It’s infinitely customizable, with beautiful downloadable watch-faces and useful watch-specific apps for cycling, running, golfing, music playback, caller ID, e-mail and more.

Look intriguing?

The project will be taking funding pledges until May 18 at which point, the watches will go into production. Once they’re ready, they’ll retail for more than $150, according to the project page, but if you pledge $115 or $125 toward the project, you’ll get your own watch. The watches are estimated to begin delivery in September and will be available in black, white or red, with a fourth color to be chosen by the project’s supporters.

Are you sold? Would you support this project?

Pebble set its goal on Kickstarter at a humble $100,000. Not only did Pebble reach their goal (in record time), but they are the largest ever Kickstarter campaign. To date they have raised almost $10 million and still have 9 days left to go.

What do you think about the hottest hardware on the market?

When was the last time you did a science experiment? No, dying your roommate’s hair doesn’t count.

For most of us, our days in the home-made laboratory ended after building a simple circuit board and graduating middle school. Well, today ExchangeMyPhone is proposing that you get back in touch with you inner mad scientist and build something much more useful than a paper-mache volcano.

When you think about it, we known shockingly little about the technology with which we interact and rely upon in our daily lives. Perhaps we think that it is way over our heads but it turns out that some technologies really are child’s play. We bring you the DIY cell phone!

MIT MediaLab is in the prototypal stages of creating an all-in-one kit for mobile phone construction, something that you can build in one afternoon, and with less aggravation than it takes to assemble an IKEA bookshelf. The functionality is apparently very good and you can even program caller id. Plus, this isn’t your 1990′s clunker, it is complete with a wood case and LCD screen. Very fancy.  For right now, the DIY cellpone kit goes for $150.00.

Finally, as Endgaget warns, ”Building your own wireless communications device isn’t for the faint of heart, or the law-abiding — the FCC tends to prefer placing its own stamp of approval on devices that utilize US airwaves, making a homegrown mobile phone an unlikely proposition. That didn’t stop a team at the MIT Media Lab from creating such a DIY kit, however.” But what great scientist didn’t break a few rules in the name of innovation?

This might be the silliest thing that we have ever profiled on our Wednesday Tech Tips, but it made us laugh so we had to share it with you.

At ExchangeMyPhone we are big fans of anything that combines our passions for tech, re-use and upcycling. Tell us about something that finds a new home for a loved old tech device and we’re sold.

So you might understand why this caught our eye:

Do you remember those old iMacs that came out in jewel colours back in the late 1990s? These colorful, translucent little all-in-one units were arguably the most attractive computers on the market at the time. Those who owned them loved them, and many of us coveted them. But we moved on, we became obsessed with thinness, laptops started to rule the roost and all those old iMacs got left behind, put up in attics and tucked away in dusty basements.

AtomicAttic wanted to change that and bring those legendary computers back into our homes. So she decided to upcycle the entire iMac and make it into a bed for your cat. Crazy or ingenious? It is your call.

What do American workers value more than company-comped meals, cellphones, or even paid vacation time?  The opportunity to work in their pajamas.  Ok, well not exactly, but what they do value is the ability to work remotely, meaning from home, from the sofa, from the coffee shop, wherever they work most comfortably.

“Many organizations are dealing with the ‘human cloud’ paradigm—this idea of employees spread across several cities, countries and cultures. Our survey on remote collaboration shows there might actually be many more distributed teams than one might think,”, remarked Wrike CEO Andrew Filev. “Technology can make virtual teams just as efficient as if they were collaborating in the same office. With so many companies now dealing with the promise of remote collaboration, Wrike’s remote project management features are specifically designed to ensure everyone stays on the same page, no matter where they’re physically located.”

You would be forgiven for thinking that we have a slightly unhealthy obsession with iPhone customization. You would probably be right, but after our last tech tip on hacking the iPhone we couldn’t help ourselves, we had to explore if there were any other cool ways to bring some individual style to our handsets (we promise there will be posts on other smartphones on here shortly!)

In turns out that we didn’t have to go too far in our search, in fact we only had to go as far as the NYC subway. There, among the sea of smartphone holders, we saw a case that really caught our eye. We started chatting to the owner and she led us to a company called KEES. Have you heard of them? You probably have, but they were new to us. And we feel in love instantly.

Essentially, KEES lets you control every part of the design process. You just have to dream up the case design that you want and they will create it using the very latest in 3D printing. This is how it works:

Choose what kind of bumper (aka case) you want.

Choose your background. We went old-school with Persian.

Select your illustration. Persian, diamonds - we are going for the lux appeal here

Pick a color. We jazzed things up and went for the pink.

Check out the artwork. We're sold.

Look like fun? Are you keen to experiment? We would love you to share your designs with us on here and on twitter. Happy designing!

By MAGGIE MURPHY

Urban farming has taken off in the past few years, but it doesn’t always take a luxury rooftop to grow your own urban veggies.  The Brooklyn non-profit WindowFarms is taking high tech farming techniques previously monopolized by NASA (to investigate outer-space agriculture) and bringing these valuable advances down to earth, literally, by making them available to the earthling public.

As Window Farms explains, “NASA has been experimenting with hydroponics to grow food locally on the space station, where fresh food transportation costs are obviously exorbitant. For many of us who live in cities, our conditions are not so different from the space station – from a plant’s point of view or from the standpoint of our high carbon “foodprint”. Hydroponics make a lot of sense for today’s world.”

The science behind WindowFarms is hydroponic gardening, and the use of liquid soil that maximizes small spaces and doesn’t leave your place smelling like a compost bin.  Rather than deriving nutrients from regular soil, the life source of window plants is delivered through water.  Therefore, a big plant can grow in a small container.

At ExchangeMyPhone we love the idea of bringing some green into cramped apartments but we also take our hats off to WindowFarms’ socially conscious approach.  Rather than peddling the hydroponic design to salad-hungry city dwellers, they keep all their patents public and encourage perspective window farmers to not only to build their own farms from resources materials like water bottles, but to also report how they are improving on the company’s free instructions.

If you want to hear more about the philosophy of WindowFarms watch Britta Riley’s awesome Ted Talk.  It is sure to have you rolling up your sleeves and hanging up your garden.

There are million words that you may use to describe New York, not all of them pretty, but you would be hard-pressed to call it boring. This is a city of creatives, of original thinkers, of crazies. It is a city founded on self-expression. So how can we make that self-expression filter down to our tech, or more specifically, our iPhones?

We all know that iPhones come in two colours, black and white, and most of us are content enough show off our customization with a snazzy looking case. But what if you want to take it a step further, what if you want to opt for what Jenna Wortham terms “surgical modifications”? In her words, there are some “rebels (who decided) to transform their devices by replacing the front and back panels with colorful unauthorized alternatives, ensuring that they stand out in a sea of millions of identical phones.”

Sound intriguing? Here are two of the most innovative designs we have seen:

Colorware lets you customize everything from the back of your phone to the earbuds. We particularly love this sailor look, just in time to match our summer wardrobe.

Our favourite has to be Material6 who let you replace the back of your iPhone with an original, hard-carved wooden design.

As a word of warning, messing around with the iPhone can be expensive and is a tad risky. Apple may refuse to service or repair a phone if it has clearly been tampered with. However, from all we have seen, those who do take the risk, and break out of the mold, say that it is well worth it. What do you think?

With victory gardens sprouting up everywhere, the modern public is well aware that we have much to learn from our penny-pinching ancestors.  So, if you’ve watered your tomato plants and are looking for another tried and true tradition of thrift why not start a lending library?

Yes, the libraries we know contain books, but there are so many other ways that the simple idea of sharing, through the model of a library, can serve the public.  For instance, many communities have opened tool libraries because, let’s face it, how often are you using that cordless drill that Dad bought you? Chances are you could spare it for an afternoon in return for some gardening gadgets this summer, or a step ladder when you tackle your spring cleaning, both items that your neighbors may have tucked away collecting dust.

Of course the central benefit of a lending library is that it saves money, just like breaking a hard-cover habit in favor of your local library or used book store.  But it doesn’t stop there. Lending also cuts down on consumption, preserving the energy it would have taken to either make another step ladder or break it down in the dump when you toss it out.  Finally, lending strengthens our sense of community and fosters trust and dialogue among neighbors, which we all could use much more of.

If starting your own lending library feels overwhelming, consider joining some of the pre-existing ones online. With a bit of searching, you can find people that are willing to rent out everything from baby shower décor to video games. Its also important to remember that lending, even on the smallest scale, is profitable. So, instead of rushing out to buy a new outfit for that special occasion, why not raid your best friend’s closet?

The final, and perhaps least obvious, commodity for lending is knowledge.  Rather than signing up for drumming lessons, why not just ask that guy down the street? Chances are he just might be looking for a ___________ (insert your specialty here) tutor as well. It is a lot cheeper than the alternative and you might even get a new friend thrown in for free!