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.

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 !!!!

First Day at EnLEn

Friday, 1st of Feb 2008, I was roaming around the office to complete my last day formalities at office. Finally at 5:00 PM just 30 min before the official day ended I got relieved :-) . That was the moment. We had a great party at office CCD. My friends visited my home for the last time in Noida. We partied whole night. The moment I got relieved, I got a call from Ashwin to inform me that the company was registered. EnLEn Marketing and Renewables energy systems Pvt Ltd.

And today on Monday 4th of Feb 2008, here I'm at Ashwin's home and our new office, working on the SapGreen's website.

Choices for a Social entrepreneur

When we came up with the idea of SapGreen, we were in fix. We didn't know if we should start this
as an NGO, in the old fashioned way and people to donate money or to start this a profit making company. After few days of discussion we decided to go with the idea of a company.We had our reasons.

• Accountability : To make sure our clients trusts us, we had to make sure we were accountable. We were ready to pay tax. We knew tax exemptions given by govt. to NGO/NPOs was a good thing, but it turns out be a play ground for the rich and mighty politicians. Just to narrate an incident, one my ex-colleagues had taken a receipt of 5 lac INR from an NGO to save his tax and the NGO in turn converted it's black money to white. He refused to tell me the name of the NGO.
  
• Sustainability: By making a profitable business it not only helps us make sure the trees survive but also to make sure we grow. At the same time we could make sure to replace dead trees and monitor them.

In simple words profitability helps us serve better. Hence we decided to go with a profitable business model. You can actually see how companies like SELCO and TreeFlights are make a difference with a profitable business model.

How to Start a company in India ?

When we had our first draft of business plan, we thought it's time to go ahead and register the company. When I visited MCA website, was relieved to see that they have option for doing many process online, which is a rare commodity in .gov.in websites. After some googling we started and we were able to get our DIN and the process went smooth.
It was time to go for the next step, but we stopped !!!! Reason the process was simply pathetic. The website seem to get worse day by day. We had know way to proceed, until we came across
this DoingBusiness . Just to remind you this data is the ideal case. There's no way you can do it within 89 days.
Here's what we decided ; We went to an auditor. It was tough time to choose an auditor in Mysore, many didn't wanted to take and some said we do only "technology pvt.ltd". Finally we got one who understood our idea and he agreed. And latter we cam know why other audiotrs rejected take this up.He said it would cost around 30K INR !!!!!! WOW there goes major chunk of our budget :(.

Now came another tough part, choosing the name, we had to choose four names.... that was OK, but the company name should also tell what your company does. No one knows what a GREEN business suffix should contain. Auditor suggested "SapGreen Marketing and Renewables Pvt. Ltd".

They rejected it saying the name was "too general" and no other information was given !!!! Yes the weasels rejected it saying the same thing three times. The worst part was they took their own time to reject our applications. They things much slower than a koala bear walks, what are they trying to preserve their energy for ? counting bribes I guess. It was so obvivous, they needed money and it was even more obvious we are not ready to give them. They are playing with our dreams. They will do anything for money, they even register companies like "Mintreee Tech" (note the extra 'e', check here) but not "SapGreen Renewables" !!!. (SapGreen here mean yele-hasiru in Kannada which has nothing to with SAP Technologoies). We are now trying with "EnLEn Marketing and Renewables Pvt Ltd". It has already been five months since we started this process :(

They are just killing innvoation. Hats off to all the Indian Entrepreneurs who do end up being successful after such chaotic start. It's a good thing I guess, because if you solve this problem you will have the mental strength to face any challenges :-).