Interested in submitting your startup for a feature in Startup Tuesday? Just follow the format below and email your info, with a photo of the founders, to me at gus.sentementes@baltsun.com.

* Company: Earth Aid Enterprises LLC

* Founders: Ben Bixby (pictured) & Greg O'Keeffe

 * Number of employees: Six and a half, plus three undergraduate interns and two graduate student fellows.

* Headquarters: Washington, D.C. (14th & K Streets NW)

* Field/Industry: Green tech

* Product(s) and what it does:  Earth Aid's patent-pending web application makes it possible for you to link all your utility accounts (electric, gas, water) in one place to see the big picture, to identify opportunities to save, and to get rewarded for saving energy and water. Earth Aid automatically identifies all the federal, state, and local incentive programs in your area that you may be eligible to tap - and, in certain cities beginning on Sept. 8th, Earth Aid enables you to earn rewards points for saving energy and to redeem those points for exclusive discounts and offers from local businesses.

* Website/Twitter/Blog links: http://www.earthaid.net; @earthaid (on Twitter)

* The genesis of the idea for the company: EarthAid.net is a project over a year and a half in development, and the outgrowth of Earth Aid's original business as a creative online retailer of home energy efficiency products. We built EarthAidKit.com to be the first online store that offered dynamic, personalized calculations of the approximate impact of the products in a user's shopping cart. In measuring our impact in both the individual level and in the aggregate, we realized that we may well have missed the point - we may have known that a user purchased a more efficient lightbulb, but we didn't know if they ever used it, if they used it as we had expected, or if in fact they used it not to replace an inefficient bulb but for a completely new lamp. It became apparent that measuring by products (as so many individuals, companies, and even government programs tend to do) completely missed the point; often times, new products would result in an increase in energy consumption either because they're additional products or because the efficiency on the label lulls consumers into a sense of complacency. We knew it must be possible to measure on automated basis and at scale, and we built EarthAid.net as a free tool to do so - so individuals and communities alike can keep track of their actual impact, and can be incentivized on the basis of actual achievement, not just purchasing products.

* Most important local/regional resource you tapped to start your company: Without a doubt, the people. The Washington, D.C. area is filled with people who think differently -- as the course of history has shown from time to time, this isn't always a good thing. However, we've been able to put together the best of Washington's tendency to attract issue-driven, community-organizing, conventional-wisdom-challenging people to build a creative team that's brining new thinking to how the private sector can be brought to bear - and can partner with the public sector - to create meaningful, measurable change that benefits households, the environment, and the economy.