Green Gurus: Talks On Sustainability, Green Business, & Consulting

Our friends over at Recycled Minds recently put up a very cool, new logo on their blog.

In case you don’t make it over there for a look, here’s a snapshot of it.  But either way, we definitely recommend that you stop by and read some of their posts, it’s some of the best reporting on world indigenous rights and the like, that we’ve come across.

What a whirlwind life and business can be.  Here’s a quick snapshot of our last month or so…

Coachella was a great time, working with The Do LaB there…though the event still is far from the sustainable festival it could (and should) be.  Lightning In A Bottle on the other hand, is the pinnacle of what green festivals are meant to be, and we were proud to have so many of our team members be so intimately involved with its production, again.

This year’s event highlights for me, were mostly the guest speakers that I booked to speak in the Temple of Consciousness/Healing dome space.  Some of the highlights included talks from the Algalita Crew, a dot-com panel with some other great, green gurus Creative Citizen CEO Scott Badenoch, Jenn Breckenridge (web marketing consultant for the Greenloop, managing editor for eConsciousMarket.com, and more), Ben Clayton (Gliving, WattsUp America, etc.), and moderated by our very own Ryan Wartena.

Speaking of whom, Ryan recently joined one of the most exciting clean and green tech companies, iCel® Systems, Inc. as their Chief Technology Officer!  Congratulations to him on his continued personal and professional path.

In regards to our company’s development, we’ve been exploring a number of different paths:  from a deeper look into green data center development, services, etc. to getting our company LEED’s certified, to finding some new, key members to help actualize some of these options.  We’re also looking into opening an east coast office, due to a continued request for our services on the greater eastern seaboard.  Should you or someone you know be interested in joining either of coastal-based teams, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

As for our solar powered web hosting intentions, they’ve fallen much farther behind schedule then we’d hoped to be with this service offering and have now put any sort of public launch of this on hold, due to manpower restraints.  And in that time, other companies have manifested similar services as we too had sought to make available.

Lastly, in area’s more personally related, my fiance and I recently found out we’re expecting…which has obviously triggered a whole new perspective on what it means to be living green and such.  So much so that you’ll probably be seeing a whole new range of services here in the not so distant future. 

We’ve launched our new website design today.

If you catch any bugs or glitches, please let us know about them.

Also, Brent and I will be out of town for the next week working at Coachella with The Do LaB. We will not be able to respond to any emails until the 28th. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Marlene Martinez from Public Affairs with Caltrans approached us this week about doing a table at their Earth Day event roughly two weeks from now.

So, we’ll be doing a table, hosted by Ryan Wartena, along with Freya Bardell of GreenMeme. Come on out and say hi if your in the neighborhood!  Details on the event below…
–

California Department of Transportation
District 7 – Los Angeles & Ventura Counties
100 South Main Street
Los Angeles, California 90012
http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist07/index.php

EARTH DAY EVENT

WHO:  California Department of Transportation
WHAT:  Earth Day - “A Day of Information”
WHAT:  Come share information concerning one or multiple ways your company is environmentally improving your practices and/or emissions
WHEN:  April 22, 2008, 10:00 a.m.
WHERE:  Caltrans Building Plaza at 100 South Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012

BACKGROUND:  The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is celebrating Earth Day by planting trees in our plaza and inviting other environmentally conscious businesses and departments to share information and ideas

COST:  No charge to participants or the public
PHONE:  213-897-3656

Craigslist recently launched their official blog.

One of their first posts offered some transparency into their energy consciousness:

“Serving 10 billion page views on a few hundred servers, craigslist leads the internet industry by orders of magnitude when it comes to efficient use of electricity. The last time I checked we were clocking something like 175,000 page views per kilowatt-hour.

Compare this to single digit thousands of pages-per-kwhr for most large sites, which typically run tens to hundreds of thousands of servers.”

We think it’s great to see them not only doing a great job in conserving their energy use but also in making it common knowledge and hopefully resulting in some friendly, competition to raise the bar on this issue all around in the Internet industry.

Electronics in the United States should have a UL (Underwriters Laboratory) tag on them somewhere, in Europe, it’s the CE tag.

Guess how much electricity your computer uses and then take a look at the tag and see what the maximum power consumption is.

Power is measured in Watts, W (Watts, Volts and Amperes are always capitalized since they are named after people).  Sometimes, on battery-powered devices, the power is not stated, but the current (in Amperes or Amps) and the potential (in Volts) will be.  In this case, you multiply the current (in Amperes or Amps) with the potential to get the maximum amount of instantaneous power your device uses (in Watts).  Typically, cell phones use 3 to 5 Watts and laptops use 35 to 50 Watts.  Coffee makers are typically 900 Watts.  Wow.

When you use power for a duration of time, you can determine how much energy has been used.  If you use your cell phone at a power level of 5 Watts for 1 hour then you have used 5 Watthours (Wh) of energy.  A battery’s capacity is how much energy it holds.

Take a quick gander and count up the amount of power you are using right now.  You may have to catch the refridgerator if its running.  You can also split that up between your housemates.  Honestly, it will take some real effort to determine how much power you use at any moment, there is a lot of power that was put into making the products in front of you.  This is okay, as long as we are aware that our power and energy usage and continue to clarify where it comes from and educate our selves to the direct and embedded energies that fuel our lifes.

Right now, my direct power use is about 100 Watts (two computers and a cell phone) and its daytime so I don’t need to worry about lighting and the alarm clock by the bed is on but I don’t see it.  I’m sure Im not counting everything, but I’m getting closer.

In 1998 the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology issued its vision for each person to live under 2000-Watts, the current average in the United States is 12,000 Watts.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Watt_society

There is a new design paradigm emerging, one that replaced the brute-force method of getting it done.  In the past, adding more power or energy meant getting more functionality (more gas give more speed).  Now, the elegant design challenge is to get more functionality with less energy (go farther with a hybrid-electric car with regeneative charging from breaking).  Where does this lead?  All the functionality with no to minimal energy.  This is beauty.

And, this is enegy awareness and it spreads.  Electrical power is political power.  Know your power and energy.

We’re pleased to announce the addition of one of our green consulting team members Ryan Wartena, here to our blog team.

He joined our open source collective a few months back and has quickly become a core voice in our operations. His wealth of knowledge spans a great many topics: sacred geometry to PV and battery systems design, to business development to so much more. He’s really all around quite a bit of fun too, which we feel is an important part of the creative and professional processes…why else would or should you do something if it doesn’t bring you some measure of joy?

Anyway, we welcome him here to our blog and look forward to his future posts!

We’ve got our solar powered web server configured and up and running today.

Next we’ll be tying up a slew of details from plan details to pricing to support and billing. We’re taking inquiries now for those interested in going solar for their web hosting needs and will follow up with more details just as soon as we get the final details locked in.

We’ve brought on some new tech heads to help out with some of these tasks but are still (and always) on the look out for great, new team members. Should you have any experience in tech, billing and customer service and support, programming, and the like, we’d love to hear from you.

More on all of this soon.

First off a quick, Green Gurus team update on current events…

Last week while Shena was prepping for her time at the South By Southwest festival, Ryan continued working on one of his new solar flower designs, Elizabeth continued pouring over the latest Plan Check plans for one of our clients, Doug continued work on his thesis draft, Brent worked on the latest fabrication plans, Evonne carried on in Second Life, and I hit up Greg Wendt, Jeff Hayes, Sarah Shewey, Kipp Stroden, and Ferris Kawar’s Green Business Networking monthly night.

This was the first night that I had been able to make it out since hearing about it several months back. I ran into several great people I’ve been talking with recently and many more great faces, all from around the LA startup and sustainable business circles.

Several previous contacts included Michael Moss / Founder Green Nectarine, Jenn “1luv” Breckenridge, and Ben Clayton / Gliving, Watts Up America, etc. I also got to put some names to faces we’ve been hearing more about recently, like Scott Badenoch / Founder Creative Citizen and Melanie StJames / Executive Director of Empowerment Works. Other new faces included Olivia Kuhn-Lloyd / Cause + Capitalism Blog Author, Laura Beatty, Kacy Palmieri / Earth Day LA, Kristofer Youngstrom / Engineer at Digital Housing & Administration, and the Heart Beet Gardening gaia’s.

A few people were asking after more networking nights at this event and the LA Green Drinks was mentioned more than once, which we posted about last year here. Others range from Lunch 2.0 to Dealmaker, to LA’s Largest Mixer to Mashable’s return with “MashMeet LA 2.0“, and many, many others.

Some handy online resources include LA Times “Emerald City” blog, Siel’s “green LA girl“, the Green Group, etc….you just have to keep at it, digging around online, joining various social networking groups, meeting up at the local business mixers in person, and all the rest. Whatever the case may be, we’d love to meet up with you in person at the next LA Green Drinks or other event of your choosing…

Feel free to contact us here if you need help figuring out what to hit up next, carpooling arrangements or any other details.

We look forward to meeting up with you sometime soon!

Green Gurus is on the prowl for some new tech-driven team members.

Our team is comprised of a wide-range of talents from sustainable energy systems designers, feature film miniature and mechanical engineers, sustainable architects, Second Life programmers, and a host of other skills. Our projects range from multi-thousand person events, to on-air consulting, to feature films, to eCommerce, to manufacturing, and much, much more.

We’re well connected and very active in the Los Angeles underground modern tribal scene (cliche yes, but it fits the part), utilizing a vast range of science, technologies and metaphysics.

Here are our current task priorities:

1. Our site: GreenGurus.net

We’ve got to nail down a site design fitting of our name and team’s skills. We’ll have a much better conversion rate in closing new clients if we get this locked down.

2. Our keyword domains

We’ve got around 500 domains, most of them green-themed: We’re looking into monetizing a bunch, selling some and building out others.

3. Green eCommerce platform

One of our other companies, Distinctivefabric.com has an extensive, proprietary code base that we’re looking to overhaul into a green eCommerce platform and then license and/or sell.

4. Solar powered web hosting

We’re working towards our own solar powered data center chain, but until we’ve raised the money to put that together, we’ll be running on a dedicated server through AISO.net, configuration with them happening right now, should be up and running within the next week.

If any of these projects appeal to you and you think you’d like to explore a potential partnership with us to help manifest any of these items, then please let us know. We’re only able to pay through profit-sharing, performance-based pay and/or sweat equity right now. Assuming we get our site up to snuff, we can really start creating some exciting and meaningful compensation opportunities.

We continue to receive steadily increasing inquiries, have got some great natural page ranking on Google, especially under “green consulting” search terms, our team member’s individual projects and companies continue to complement our own here, and much more.

You are adept in any of these programs/languages/CMS:

PHP, MySQL, Python, Perl, Ruby, RoR, Ajax, Java/JavaScript, XML/XHTML, Drupal/Joomla/etc., WordPress (including installs), Apache/Debian, Photoshop/The Gimp, Illustrator, Quark, InDesign, AutoCad, Maya, Flash, ActionScripting, API interfacing, version control systems, Unix, ProTools, Logic, Ableton Live, and any other language or science you’re competent with in producing results.

You have experience from school and/or on-the-job training, can provide live and close to or fully completed projects online, have a working/proficient understanding of iterative, agile and atomic coding techniques/philosophies, and are otherwise a bad-ass online.

Preferably: you work in open source, off a Mac or Linux box, but have some working understanding of PC to get around should the need arise; live within the US, ideally w/in CA > Los Angeles…if not, possibilities still exist. Telecommunicating okay.

Please submit any relative content, links, resumes, or other media format…just be creative, inventive, entrepreneurial, and socially/eco-conscious in your approach to contacting us.

Also, see our ad on Craigslist.