A few days ago, I posted a story about a fund that will target green building technologies. I said it began with an N, but didn't have the complete name because I lost the piece of paper I wrote it on. The fund turns out to be part of Navitas Capital, the investment arm of the Zeeman family. Jan Zeeman founded a successful chain of textile outlets and now wants to invest in sustainable technologies, particularly green building technologies. Navitas comes out of the Netherlands, but Travis Putnam out of Los Angeles is the managing partner. "Entrepreneur/investor focused on sustainability in the built environment, in particular by accelerating the adoption of advanced green building practices," reads his LinkedIn profile. Navitas has started to make investments but not made a much of a public splash yet. The firm is already an investor in Integrity Block, which makes building blocks out of rammed earth instead of cement. It's the same technology that several pre-Colombian civilizations in North and South America used, but Integrity Block has refined it and made it more waterproof, durable, and able to withstand modern construction requirements. It is quite interesting. (Virginia, in the reader comments to the first story, tipped me onto that and I confirmed it on Integrity's Website. She also said that Navitas is an investor in Serious, but the firm isn't listed publicly as an investor yet. Will check up on it.) These stories and the research, however, also further solidified in my mind another trend that is taking place. That is, we are seeing the formation of a green building mafia, right in our midst. Kevin Surace, the CEO of Serious, is a board member of Integrity Block. He is also involved with Zeta Communities, a green building developer. Zeta's CEO is Naomi Porat, whose brother, Marc Porat, runs Cal-Star Cement, which has been also linked with Serious. And Serious and Cal-Star both have received investment from Foundation Capital. Serious also bought a window company, Alpen Windows, earlier this year. Insulation is next for serious. That covers structures and most of the materials needed for construction. It's similar to the conglomeration of companies that make ethanol and fuel from microbes that has formed at Khosla Ventures. We're just ordinary businessmen; leave us alone, I half expect Surace to say. Do you want a mouthful of Chicklets? Just go home and take these steaks to your wife. But it's something to keep your eye on.

They're going bonkers for LEDs and energy efficiency at Dell. The Round Rock, Texas-based PC maker plans to aggressively promote laptops with screens lit with light emitting diodes (LEDs). Right now, most laptops come with screens lit by cold cathode florescent bulbs: Most manufacturers actually offer LEDs in only a few select models. A year from now, LEDs will be available across all laptops from Dell in every region in the world, said Michael Murphy, who runs worldwide environmental affairs for Dell. By the end of 2009, 80 percent of the laptops Dell ships will have LED screens. By the end of 2010, Dell will only sell LED-based laptops. Getting consumers to pick up LED laptops shouldn't be too tough. Although more costly now, the price delta on these machines is dropping. Five months from now, the price tag on LED and standard laptops will be about the same, Murphy said. Dell's costs for putting in LEDs will be a little higher, but the delta will begin to become negligible. At the same time, LED laptops will sport a number of benefits. The screens consume 43 percent less power than conventional screens. While that  helps the environment, it also means battery life will increase. Combining LED screens along with solid state flash drives and energy efficient software can boost battery life on a laptop to six hours or so, said Murphy. LED notebooks can also be thinner than their cold cathode counterparts. This results in lighter, more stylish laptops. In mass production, it also leads to less shipping and manufacturing. It's a classic Angelina Jolie play: You get to be fashionable and claim you're doing something good for the world. Once the largest PC maker in the world, Dell is now trying to catch back up to the new number one, Hewlett-Packard. As part of that effort, it has latched onto the environmental message fairly strongly, which makes sense. Dell is located just outside of Austin, one of centers for greentech in the U.S. (The only sign that you are actually in Texas when you're at the Dell campus, is one on the door telling you that weapons aren't permitted in the workplace.) More importantly, energy efficient technologies have become appealing to IT managers because of high electricity costs. Until 2006, IT managers did not ask server vendors about energy efficiency. Since then, it has been one of the first questions to come up in sales pitches, say people who sell equipment. Green components like LEDs have also become less expensive. Historically, Dell adopts new components when the price delta is almost gone.