Yippee! We are officially launching today! A little behind schedule but that’s ok. The fizzy drinks are being cracked open, smiles of relief and joy are painted on our faces, oh happy are we. For those of you unfamiliar with Edenbee here’s the obligatory background info.

The concept of Edenbee began almost two years ago when we ran a conference focusing on the diminishing oil reserves in the world, a concept know as Peak Oil. Championed by Professor Dr. Colin Camplell, Peak Oil refers to the point in time at which the maximum global petroleum production rate is reached. And well, it seems we’ve reached it.

The implications of this are pretty simple, we are running out of oil, and consequently the oil that we have used to date has contributed to global climate change! A double-whammy.

While the conference was a success we had only reached five or so hundred people. At the time we were reading James Surowiecki’s the Wisdom of Crowds in which he explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

Mmm! we thought, what about reaching a greater audience and offering them a place to congregate and discuss these issues while exploring useful and simple solutions for living a less impacting life. With a little bit of this and a little bit of that the concept of Edenbee was born.

Now we are an optimistic bunch at Edenbee, we believe that it’s about forming new habits in our lives, habits that will benefit us all in the long term. Edenbee is here to facilitate those habit-changing behaviors by allowing you to set goals and work towards them, encouraged and assisted by the larger community.

This is a work in progress and we need your feedback, after all we have built this space with you in mind. We’d love to hear from you, get your thoughts and hear your suggestions. Edenbee is a new garden that will benefit from a little gentle cultivation.

For all you techie people! Pop the hood of Edenbee and you’ll find a host of goodies. Our programming language is Ruby on a Ruby on Rails framework popped onto a MySQL database and hosted on Brightbox servers. Big round of applause to our friends and development partners Clearleft and New Bamboo who I think you’ll agree have done a great job! As ever these guys are Web Standard flag bearers and Micro-format champions and really good at what they do. Thanks to the guys at d::gen who’s AMEE (Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine) API we are using for our carbon calculation.

In closing there are so many people to thank for Edenbee. Thanks to our angel investors for seeing the bigger picture. To New Media for the great name and logo! Big thanks to all our close friends who have supported us along the way and given us so much encouragement. Particularly Ken Kinsella our third partner, also John Harrington, Niall Tallon, Graham Molloy, Eoin Campbell and finally Davie Phillip of Cultivate whose work in sustainability is an inspiration to us all. Big thanks to Relly Annett-Baker and James L. Clarke for their slick and witty copy. There are more but we wont bore you with them all, you guys know who you are!!

The lads at Edenbee