About us

APEsphere provides news and analysis on responsible business and engaged, green living.

Capitalism is evolving; profits can no longer come before people or planet, and people are searching for lives, no longer satisfied with consuming lifestyles.

How we conduct business, who we choose to work for, invest in or buy from - these are choices we should make with full awareness of their impacts and our influence over them.

At the heart of this conversation is the APEsphere blog founded and written by Andrew Newton and Angela Peterson Newton.

We have also brought together a community of great writers to contribute blogs on specific aspects of APEsphere's favourite subjects. You can explore our blogs here.

All that's left is for you to log in and join the conversation.

Why the weird name?

The original coining of the name "APEsphere" came from a phrase, "Agents of Progressive Enterprise", and an idea - that you should be able to be the same person in the work sphere as you are in your home sphere.

Since APEsphere was conceived, of course, the name has come to signify more.

The idea of a "sphere" resonates strongly with the idea of the public sphere in which ideas are exchanged and our understanding advanced.

Now "APE" hints at the idea of evolution, and because an ape is a living being it is a symbol of evolution with which we can identify: APEsphere is about who you are, not simply about something you do.

How appropriate that this site's symbol should encourage us to identify with something broader even than our own species, an incremental step towards identifying with the whole of our living planet.

How do I find what I want?

APEsphere is essentially two magazines - BusinessAPE and LivingAPE - joined together by the APEsphere front page. You can navigate through the sections of these magazines using the Business and Living buttons on the main site menu.

We have also designed APEsphere to develop more and more specialist pages. From the main menu you can view pages built around Companies (and their sectors), Regions and Impacts - by which we mean the kinds of impact that companies have on the world. If you dip into the Tags pull down menu you can find pages built around keywords and phrases like "climate change" or "Barack Obama".

Once you have registered on the site (which is easy to do and free) then you will also see the My APEsphere button on the main menu. This is where you can edit your profile, browse through the latest comments added by the people you have added to your troop and exchange APEmail with them, and choose to have APEsphere delivered to your email inbox each day or fed into your RSS feed reader.

The team

APEsphere was founded and is run by Andrew Newton and Angela Peterson Newton.

Andrew Newton is a qualified barrister with a MBA from London Business School. He has spent the last 16 years working in and then writing on responsible business subjects. His first book "The Handbook of Compliance - making ethics work in financial services" was published by Financial Times Prentice Hall in 1998. When time allows Andrew is developing two further works, one on the theory and one on the practice of responsible business. He will be using the APEsphere blog and The Missing Link blog to drive a conversation to help inform and test the ideas he is exploring in his writing.

Angela's background is as a stage director/producer. Now she writes full time, interrupting work on a novel to take on the role of editor of the LivingAPE side of the site. Angela expects to graduate from Harvard with a Masters in English in 2010. She will be using the APEsphere blog to change people's focus from a consumption-based solution to the challenges we face, towards a more conscious consumerism and collective activism.

APEsphere Virtual Interns

The development team

APEsphere would have remained a very long and unduly complicated specification document without the guidance, problem-solving and programming skills of Velocity Software Solutions in Noida, India. Our project manager at Velocity is Vikas Kumar, and our lead programmer is Ashish Kumar.

Vikas is a Lotus Notes consultant, web developer, and a computer science graduate with an MBA from Symbiosis Pune (India). We know Velocity keeps him really busy, but even so he remains one of the most generous and patient colleagues we have ever had the pleasure of doing business with.

Ashish is a senior software programmer with is a Information technology degree from HBTI Kanpur (India) and blinding expertise in PHP and Java. He is, in his own words, a very sincere and hard working professional who loves to overcome technical challenges with style! We cannot disagree with that.

APEsphere has benefitted from the years of hard work that have been ploughed into open source systems by their developer communities. Within APEsphere there is code from Pligg,Wordpress and PHPBB which we license under a GPL.

Our illustrator

How do you support yourselves?

APEsphere LLC is funded by advertisements and reader contributions. Help us by giving and giving generously to keep the site moving forward as a fresh, independent voice in responsible business and engaged, green living news and analysis.

Jobs and internships

APEsphere is not currently trying to fill any positions other than positions on our internship program (see below).

Although we do not currently have any work to offer freelance journalists, we are always pleased to hear from journalists that have particular interest or experience in writing about the subjects we cover. One day we expect to begin working with staff and freelance journalists.

APEsphere's Virtual Internship Program

Our Virtual Internship Program (yes, that would be VIP) provides a flexible opportunity to gain insights into the running of a virtual, online media organization dedicated to bringing about social change.

For more information about the APEsphere VIP, please contact me, Andrew Newton.