Dilbert 2.0

This article doesn't have anything about going green nor does it have anything to do with sapgreen. After a lot struggle I finally got BSNL dudes to come to my home wire my phone and internet connection. I just decided to visit my favorite page on the net after a long gap of 5 months. Surprise surprise !!!! Dlibert has changed... WOW. New cool 2.0 looks was just great. Scott rocks even more.
It can't get funnier than this. Though lot of flash slows is down, the content fits right there. Just fell in love with the animations and the mashups makes it more interactive than old fashioned letters from dilbert's fan.

More than anything, do you think Scott will forget his geeky followers ? Check the Linux/Unix section at the bottom of the page. I'm definitely missing my "pointy haired weasels" these days.

The Clean colors

The rebranding trend has started. The old biggies are changing their indentit. It was UTI who changed to Axis, Canara bank changed the logo, Hutch and now it's Ceat. When rebranding happens a lot changes, company ownership,company ethcis,visions,services and the list goes on. But the most noticable change is the logo.

Have you noticed the trend in these logos ? The changed logos are simple, with clean colors,very little curves,no animals running,no hand-holding-flowers. Now why am I talking about logos heres ? Just writing a stroy about sapgreen's logo. Check the logo and colors on the site. The story behind it is simple. Ashwin as usual coming with some really funny ideas (Will post it sometime if get hold of those pages), he was revovling round the combination of SUN-WIND-TREES,combining them to create most complex and bizzare logos ever made.  The current logo was desgined by his sister.

What does it mean ?
  The Yellow-Orange means life and energy, the green circle surrounding it means confined within the environment.

Seth's Fan club ?

Anybody who reads Seth's blog will be his instant fan. The classy Bootstrapper's bible was an instant hit. Does it work ? Who cares, business is fun, bootstrapping is even more fun, most of all the book is great. If you are thinking you need huge investments to start a business, then don't think again, just go an read this book.

All I wanted to say was "Can we have a Seth's fan club site? And probably make some money out of it... :-)" Well Pamela's fan club makes money,Ronaldo's fan club makes money, why not Seth's ? There are so many bootstrappers around, who would love to be part of this club !!!!!

Climate change : Winners and Loosers

Climate change talks everywhere. Few raising voice against it, few trying to fight it,many just don't care. Now lets forget all these for a moment and lets look into the direct economics of climate change.

Lets see who is loosing.

1. Short winters, snow for a little time, yap the skates business throughout the world.
2. The insurance companies. You remember Katrina ?
3. Agriculuture, I have no comments on these, you know the prices, high costs doesn't mean profits for farmers, but lack of supply.
4. Infrastructure !!!!! Yes they need to spend more to maintain them. Long summers, heavy rains will definately change the roads.
5. Packed food industries in developing nations,as more and more people go green, they are slowly loosing thier charm.
   

And Who is winning ?

1. The clean energy companies. The most benifited, the most happiest.
   
2. The climate experts, they are fast becoming page 3 celebs.
3. The Carbon offsetting companies :)
4. The green fashion desginers and stores
5. And the next obvious profit makers in the thrid world countries are the cooling solutions. As people get ready to pay a 1000 INR more every month to avoid heat, they become easy targets for these brands.
   

And the list goes on...
Things may be little different in developing world with packed food industry growing, infrastructure changing, but they will have their share very soon, because climate change is not going to wait.

Am I still away from trees ?

It was in August 2007 that I decided to quit my job. From that day I have been dreaming about staying away from computers and getting close to nature. Well everything went as planned. But there was one small thing we didn't consider in the initial stage of planning. Yes it was the website for our company.

Days past and we started planning our investment for sapgreen and the website the heart of our business turned out to be costlier than expected. Every consulting company we went to quoted huge prices. That when we decided to do it ourselves. The problem was we didn't have any experience required for doing that. Wait a minute !!! What is opensource for ? It for people like us, free of charge softwares and yes open source did matter for us.

After months of googling, PHP codes, forms,secure form,testing (last few days have been hectic and I did develop few symptoms RSI, more on this in the next blog :) ) we finished the site.
And today I'm proud;we saved lot of money, thanks to Ravi, K* and K's sister Sapgreen is finally up and running. BTW Ravi is part of sapgreen,

And now we are back on the web. So more on green entrepreneurs, my RSI problems and Ravi's entry into sapgreen coming soon.... We are all now going to back to Trees.

(* Ashwin is known as 'K' among us)

Away from trees...

After a few green blogs, I will go back to technology. Well the reason is simple, our business does require some good online marketing, and a decent looking website, but technically complete website was required. I will describe a two things that has helped us and might bring some traffic to our site in the future, joomla and meebo.

Joomla is a content management system, ok in simple words it helps you create a website. You need no technical knowledge, unless you want to do add something on your own to joomla. If it is for a simple clean website, this is a perfect tool to start with. Most importantly it's open source and free !!!!! All you need is little experience of using internet and a browser. Well it sounds simple, but we did have our set of problems. We needed a template of our own, graphics of our own. Thankfully we had our resources for these.

Secondly, meebo a great instant messaging web 2.0 tool. Just get into meebo and you can chat with any instant message account, anywhere, without installing anything. Now how did it help us? Meebo had released two great products, "meebo me" and "meebo rooms". We just added a meebome widget to our contact page, and added a meebo room as well. Check these out and you will know what I'm saying. Overall meebo is amazing. It does bring some problems with it.
1) If you have noticed it doesn't require a login. Now it's a toy for pranksters !!!!
2) Few visited our page during testing phase, they dropped a offline message, and probably forgot to drop their name or mail id. They would probably mailed us if we didn't have a "meebo me" in our page. We are just looking to find a solution for this problem without driving away the visitors from messaging us.

Finally thanks to treeless-squirrel for their amazing video.

A new economy of carbon

As the prices of different commodities are going up, something that would change the world economy is being sprouted by the world leaders and that is the Carbon market. In years to come the Carbon emissions will be a main factor that determines the prices of everything that is being traded. So when the word "carbon" is being given a solid shape what are we doing ?

The answer is just simple, find a business in the word "carbon". Many companies are being setup which just handle the trading of carbon. As many global giants from different fields are being increasingly held accountable for the amount carbon they emit, it is necessary to find a solution to calculate,reduce and then nullify their green house gas emissions. The reduction and nullifying is together called as carbon offsetting. Now the other question is how does a organization offset it's carbon emission ?

• Switch to green energy source. If they can't do it at the source, do it somewhere else
• Invest in carbon sinks, the only known carbon sink (luckily for us) are trees.

Now when large corporations are responsibly offsetting their carbon emissions through accountable firms like carbonneutral and using mechanisms like CDM and VCS, we as individuals have a much simpler solution and costs much lower, Just find a ethical offsetting company and plant trees through them, whether offsetting your long drive or offsetting your flight trees a prefect way to do so.

Do you think offsetting is a solution to all the problems ? Well the answer is NO. Carbon Offsetting comes only after you reduce your emissions. The above systems works well but not under voluntary basis, it works well only when the "Carbon money" is part of the main economy as carbon taxes. But in India we have a long way to go, first we have to pay our taxes !!!!