Hi Environment! {entreprenureship ideas on green earth}

Environment has been an increasing concern for the generation “now”, and will be taken more seriously by generation “next”, though we all will have “good intentions towards our mother earth” it would make more sense is to make money while we are doing the “good cause”. Out here is a list of some trends / startups / initiatives, which are simple yet useful solutions to our complex mechanical world.

Rural Beekeeping has been catching lots of attention lately … out here we’ve got few initiatives initiated a unique trend called “rooftop beekeeping”. First one to check in the list is London based Fortnum & Mason where you can also buy honey online, followed by Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York hotel and Paris-based Pullman Hotels & Resorts who use it for their own internal usage & to provide it to their customers. Pullman partnered with Bee My Friend recently on Earth Day.

Car Pooling saves us miles with smiles. There have been quite a few online initiatives to facilitate searching car pooling partner online, this includes, Zimride, Galp Energia’s Galpshare which allows users to specify their interests (music / sports / business etc.). Zipcar recently has partnered with Zimride to provide a car pooling system to college and university campuses and making it further easier by Facebook-based carpool matching system.

What alternative vehicle you use when you drop your car for servicing? Bicycling … is in trend back again … Noticing most of people opting for bicycle while leaving their car for servicing, Clive Brook, a Volvo dealership in Yorkshire, thought of an idea of offering bicycles instead of courtesy cars. Waitrose, a British supermarket chain, on the other hand picked up an age old method of delivering their goods on bicycle and cart. Watch out more on bicycle trends – convertible bicycle & stroller, Cargo bikes for greener business deliveries , Lightweight electric bike, bike sharing in North America by Bixi.

Too much advertising adds too much noise, but this one is different & refreshing, these advertisements are made by salted water and stencils and stays on earth for 5 odd minutes. Since it stays temporarily there is no need for permissions from the local authorities. This company, Curb, has been involved earlier in advertising which uses natural materials, check their other work on sand sculptures, turf cutting and snow tagging innovations.

When it comes to re-cycling, TerraCycle is a company which is worth noting. Started with a very unique idea of making eco-fertilizer from organic waste and worm poop, they struck a chord with The Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Target, which gave them a turnover of USD 6 million in sales for 2007, and I believe it is quite good for a four-year-old, 12 employee company.  Their other initiatives turning old wrappers into eco-chic bags and accessories, collecting non-recyclables at big boxes stores, and also worth noting, hair waste used to clean up oil spills …

high performance web sites, the front-end techniques

Few years back from now, most of us were only focusing on backend techniques to improve performances; these were things to do with the application architect, database optimization, avoiding database round trips etc. However, a good architecture always include frontend techniques. Compiled here are some tips and tricks from the book High Performance Websites by O’Reilly for the frontend developers / technical architects / server administrators to optimize the heavy load websites for the best performances.

HTTP Requests: The very first thing to know and to focus is the HTTP requests. It’s generally good to know how many http requests your home page is making, there is a wonderful tool in firefox to assess that which is called  firebug. Is there a way to reduce it? Is there a duplication? Can we avoid unnecessary data transfer? If your home page is of 80kb, and we manage to cache most of it on the client, the possibility is that it will take fractions of seconds when someone loads it next time, and what if we are receiving 1 million hits a day, the saving of data transfer will multiply million times.

HTTP is the very base of our web technology. Optimizing requests and controlling the data transfer at the frontend level can improve performance significantly.  There are many things we can do to avoid round trips to the server reducing the time significantly. To summarize the whole thing, here are some short summaries;

CSS developer / front-end developer’s guide

Frontend development tips are most simple ones, these are some practices which can help you eliminate latency happening due to your frontend code. these are simple things such as;

Do not use @import, as it causes blank white screen phenomenon.

CSS Expressions are not recommended, as it takes extra time to process.

CSS Sprite is similar to Image map but the advantage with CSS sprite is that only a portion of an image can be used, such as, we can split the icons and use it wherever in our page on menu etc. Check out  how it is done at CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death

Inline images are another way of reducing the number of HTTP requests sent by the client, these are images converted to text in base64 format and embedded into the html.  Read more here.

There are some other simple tips too, like always put your style sheet at top, put your Java Scripts at the bottom, try make JavaScript & CSS external, identifying and removing duplicate scripts, and compressing or minifying your JavaScript (also try JSMin, Dojo Compressor – ShrinkSafe).

Internet Heroes …

Legends are legends … they inspire us, set trends, break barriers, redefine rules, change the dimensions in which we live, give us new hopes & aspirations and much more …

In this post, I tried to compile a list of my favorite people / business outfits / startups which are influential and has set the trend on the internet … these are the people who’ve stamped success on their cards in a very non conventional way and on a very non conventional medium which is Internet.

First in my list is Mashable. I like the sound of it, it sounds nice like cashable :) … Started by Pete Cashmore, when he was 19 year old at his home in Scotland, making this a reference point for every techno worker for tech trends to follow. Its a must check for geeks around the world.

Next comes Techcrunch which reviews tech companies, startups, profiles etc. This helps you find a right tech company where you can outsource, invest, connect … and have a profitable life afterwords… Started by Michael Arrington, his reviews are highly influential, so much that people feel disrespected or ignored when he fail to give them importance.

I love digg too, so does most of the population on Internet. Its owner, Kevin Rose has struck a chord with everyone on Internet with his highly popular venture digg.com. There are other popular services on similar modal such as reddit.com, stumbleupon.com, deli.cio.us and few others. My personal favorite is digg as it gives a very user friendly interface.

The most influential guy on twitter is in this list too, Guy Kawasaki has a high visibility among tech start ups due to him being a venture capitalist and author. He was part of the original team when Apple launched its first Macintosh in 1984.

Boing Boing, sounds too boing boing.. :) .. founded by Cory Doctorow and Mark Frauenfelder, this blog is about technology, culture and politics. Cory Doctorow is an activist for digital rights, and also a science fiction novelist who gives away his novels for free. Frauenfelder is editor-in-chief for an extremely highly popular do-it-yourself magazine called Make, and every geek just loves this magazine.

There is something called GigaOm.com, owned by tech journalist Om Malik, who writes for Business 2.0, Red Herring, and The Wall Street Journal, his technology blog is equally famous like him.

Also check out other tech bloggers Jason Calacanis who owns Mahalo.com a human moderated search engine, and Robert Scoble who mostly blog about tech events. Also check out some more powerful bloggers, Owen Thomas, Dave Winer, Seth Godin, Brian Lam, Steve Rubel, John C. Dvorak, Leo Laporte

That’s not it folks, will come back soon to introduce some more of my favorite entities, keep yourself posted by subscribing feeds or through email.