Growing Your Money

Growing plants (both ornamental and edible varieties) in small spaces could be a very profitable business. I see miniature roses in nurseries as well as stores like Safeway selling for $4.00 or more. Jade plants grow abundantly in the city, yet I see them selling for $5.00 or more in tiny metal containers at places like Whole Foods.

With hydroponic gardening techniques, you could grow your own vegetables very efficiently in small spaces. Here is one such "low tech" design: Building a Floating Hydroponic Garden, and here is a recent article (7/3/08) from TreeHugger.com: High Density Vertical Growth (HDVG) Garden: by Valcent.

Some of the advantages of this kind of vertical farming, highlighted in the article:

- Produces approximately 20 times the normal production volume for field crops.
- Requires 5% of the normal water requirements for field crops.
- Can be built on non arable lands and close to major city markets.

Now imagine restaurants getting the freshest produce within the same building where they serve their customers. With transportation costs continuing to climb, it may become cheaper (not to mention healthier) to grow most of our produce within a few blocks of where we live or dine out. Chez Panisse has developed a business around only organically grown, locally supplied produce.

Virtual Universities

Please check out Bastiat Free University. It is an on-line university promoting the idea of the NetCohort society:

"I believe as the netcohort society takes hold our traditional, inefficient, expensive, snobbish, government supported and regulated universities must change. They have a flawed business plan for an information society. That finance rule of thumb? If something is going to fall, it should to be pushed." - Allan R. Wallace, founder of BFU.

PHP

Went to a SF PHP Meetup last night, held downtown on 2nd street. Speaker was Andrei Zmievski. Andrei is one of the principal developers of PHP, and he talked about the new features coming out in PHP 6, most importantly the support for unicode. His talk tonight was entitled PHP::$unicode->i18n().

Learned much from the talk. Very sharp fellow and a good speaker.

Also met w/ Stephen Frost, founder of Carticipation, which just launched 8 weeks ago, with funding. Just launched a client app on the iPhone. Idea is to use cell phones to arrange car pooling into the city. This is his fourth startup.

My Life in Web 2.0 or in 3D

I work for a Web 2.0 Startup (www.ibloks.com) that is moving into 3D Video advertising. I thought it was very interesting that Google came out w/ a new service called "Lively"

Here's a link to one of the many articles relating to this interesting development:

Google's Lively -- Launched July 8, 2008

Placing Ads

Last night, I set up some banner ads on my wife's blog site, and also set up an AdSense account that I'll use on both her (English) blog site and this one.

What Is Wealth?

So, what is wealth? I think primarily for me these days it would mean having NO debts (including my mortgage payments), and enough money to be able to live, travel, invest, and give, start new companies, fulfill the great commission. Live out my Christian faith to the fullest extent possible.

I don't think it's wrong to want to prosper. I do not want money for its own sake -- money is NOT wealth, and anyway, the "love of money is the root of all evil". But to be able to do some good in this world -- it's hard to do a lot of good in this world without wealth.

Wealth is having the resources to be able to do fulfill your highest and deepest dreams for you and your family.

Recently, one of my neighbors, a couple that live in the same building where we live, returned from a 6 month trip around the world, and their place was not rented out. As far as I know it was not used during that time. Imagine having the freedom and the resources to do that!

Also recently (May 17), my wife started both an English and a Japanese blog --
http://viviansf.blogspot.com and http://ameblo.jp/viviansf/. I think partly she is doing it because she wants the freedom to pursue her dreams and become wealthy. And she's really liking it!! And I think she'll become successful at it too!

She's never enjoyed working in a typical job. She worked part time jobs while a student, and she also worked at a retail store in Haight Ashbury for about a year (it helped us get financing for our first home in the city, a condo which we bought in 2006).

But both of us still don't have the complete freedom to be able to travel like our neighbors did for 6 months.

When we can do that, I think we will both have achieved a certain level of wealth.

How to Create Wealth

Although I created this blog in March, 2008, this is my first entry. I want to address the topic of wealth, how to create it, sustain it, and build it. These are my reflections on the subject, and I hope I will be getting a lot of feedback and buzz, because I think the more wealth we can create for ourselves, and our families the better off we will be as a nation.