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.