Thursday, April 24, 2008

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.

Monday, April 21, 2008

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 !!!!!

Sunday, April 20, 2008

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.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

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)