eLiquidity

Australian Man Auctions his Life on eBay

2008-03-18T13:59:00.000-07:00

from Reuters...

"SYDNEY (Reuters) - A man in Australia is auctioning his life -- his house, his job, his clothes and his friends -- on eBay, after his marriage broke up, saying he wants to start a new life.

"It's time to move. A completely fresh start. I want to see where life takes me," Ian Usher, 44, told Australian television on Tuesday from Perth in Western Australia state.

Usher said he was auctioning his life as "a package" with his house in Perth valued at around A$420,000 (US$385,000).

"Hi there, my name is Ian Usher, and I have had enough of my life! I don't want it any more! You can have it if you like!," reads his Web site www.alife4sale.com, which has a link to eBay for bidders.

Usher said his life auction, which starts on June 22, included not only his house, a car, a motorbike, a jet ski and a spa, but also an introduction to "great friends" and a job at a rug shop in Perth for a trial two-week period.

"When it's over, I will just walk out the front door, take my wallet, my passport and start a new life," he said.

Usher said his ex-wife had heard of his auction.

"Her last comment was, 'it seems a bit mental to me'," he said."

World's Funniest Blog Posts!

2007-12-21T21:14:00.000-08:00

Man Owes $211 Trillion

2007-12-12T23:49:00.000-08:00

from "www.wsbtv.com"

"COBB COUNTY, Ga. -- It’s one thing to bounce a check and it’s another to be so far in the red Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Donald Trump combined couldn’t come close to bailing you out. A Cobb County man got a letter from his bank with that very shocking news.

“And I open up the letter and I look at it and I’m like, ‘No, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ said Joe Martins.

Martins said he recently closed an account at Wachovia Bank and made good on an outstanding check. He just got a letter about the closure and his negative balance -- $211,010,028,257,303.00. That’s $211 trillion.

The letter includes the clarification, “no cents.”

“I didn’t know what to think. Obviously $211 trillion is a little above what I put in my bank account,” said Martins.

$211 trillion is more than 70 times the entire federal budget.

Still, the letter said Wachovia was reporting him to an agency that rates risky bank customers.

“I don’t own $211 trillion but because it is automated and reported to check systems, I assume it will be reported to my credit at some point,” said Martins.

He said Wachovia had made mistakes on his accounts before so he called Channel 2 first. Wachovia blamed the letter on a word processing error and the office of the president is sending a letter of apology.

“They tell me it’s going to be resolved but I’m not sure that it will,” said Martins. “I closed my account today.”

Since it is a closed account it is now safe to say the dollar figure in the letter matched the account number.

Martins said Wachovia told him late Friday afternoon they never did report him for his negative balance. Wachovia vice president David Oliver told Channel 2, “We can certainly understand how our recent correspondence with Mr. Martins about his account would be cause for great concern. I can confirm that there will be no adverse effect on Mr. Martins’ credit report related to the letter he received. Also, I can confirm that this was an isolated error specifically related to his account.”"

Apples authorizes French unlocked iPhones

2007-10-24T15:33:00.000-07:00

from: tech.yahoo.com

"Want an unlocked version of the iPhone that's actually sanctioned by Apple? Then wing your way to France next month, when wireless operator Orange begins selling an unlocked iPhone—with Cupertino's blessing.
OK, "blessing" might be a bit of an overstatement. Apple's hand was forced by French law, which forbids the sale of cell phones that are tied to a particular carrier (hmmm, sounds like a good idea, no?). The International Herald Tribune reports that yesterday's announcement of Orange winning the iPhone deal in France was delayed for nearly a month as the carrier and Apple hammered out financial terms; an Orange rep denied that the unlocked iPhone was a factor in the delay.

Details about unlocked iPhone sales in France are still sketchy, however. What we do know is that a locked version of Orange's iPhone will retail for 399 euros (or about $560) when it debuts in November; the sticker price for an unlocked iPhone is still under wraps, but it "will cost more," the IHT reports. And here's a little something to consider for potential iPhone importers: the French iPhone will, of course, have all its menus written in French, and the last time I checked, I couldn't find a "Lauguage" setting on my iPhone. Any ideas out there, folks?"

Sprint Touch vs Apple Iphone

2007-10-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

from: tech.yahoo.com

"The enticing Sprint Touch is sexy, alright, what with its touch-screen display and iPhone-like appearance. I got some hands-on time with Touch here at CTIA, and while the initial 3D menu is certainly tap-worthy, I was reaching for the stylus once I got to the standard Windows Mobile interface.
The 3G-capable Touch ($250 with a two-year contract, available November 4) is definitely a sleek phone; it's small and slim enough to fit in a jeans pocket, and nearly featureless save for the nearly three-inch touch screen, a navigation pad and the twin soft keys. Hit the power button and you get the "TouchFlo" interface: a 3D cube that gives you quick access to the Touch's main functions (namely messaging, Web browsing, and multimedia), as well as favorite contacts. You can get to the TouchFlo cube any time by touching the Sprint logo just below the screen and swiping upward, while swiping left or right swivels the cube around; strangely, though, this "cube" really only has three sides (for apps, multimedia, and contacts), and there's nothing on the top or the bottom of the cube. Still, it's a cool-looking, clever interface, and I got a kick out of swiping and tapping it. Especially nice is the contacts pane; just click an empty box to add a contact, which appears as a photo (provided your contact has an image associated with it).

Pretty nice, but once you get beyond TouchFlo, you're left with...the pro version of Windows Mobile 6, a decidedly fingertip-averse interface. To be fair, HTC (the manufacturer of the Touch) has clearly done its best to make Windows Mobile at least a bit touch-friendly: for exampe, the home page features a handy tabbed app that gives you a quick view of your various inboxes, as well as the local weather, a program manager, and ringer profiles. The mobile Outlook also features a modified virtual keypad for tapping out messages; however, instead of getting a full set of virtual QWERTY keys, you get a pseudo-QWERTY key layout spread over 14 keys (similar to the SureType keypad on the BlackBerry Pearl). I tried typing out a few messages, and it was a tedious process; I had to press relatively hard for my taps to register, and the phone's predictave text software seemed a little twitchy (or at least it was on the demo model here at CTIA). I wouldn't be too eager to compose a lengthy e-mail on this thing.

Of course, the Touch comes with a stylus, so you'll be able to access all the other Windows Mobile 6 features with a few taps of the stick: Internet Explorer, the mobile Office suite, Windows Media Player, and other WM apps are present and accounted for. You also be able to watch streaming Sprint TV videos and download full music tracks from Sprint Music, which is always a nice bonus. That said, as I've noted before, the Touch lacks Wi-Fi, and I've yet to hear any mention of GPS.

So, does the Touch measure up to the iPhone? In my few minutes with the Touch, I'd have to say that its touch UI can't hold a candle to the iPhone's intuitive, easy-to-tap interface. But if you're looking for document editing, full Exchange support, and full-on streaming video (none of which are possible on the iPhone, save for its streaming YouTube app), the Touch could make for an interesting choice—provided you're not composing massive e-mails on the road. Now, if the Touch had a slide-out QWERTY keypad...well, that would be another thing altogether."

This is your brain on the web!!!

2007-10-24T13:38:00.001-07:00

from: Reuters

"11% of Americans Would Implant Internet into Brain Powered by BlogBurst
POSTED: Wednesday, October 24, 2007
FROM BLOG: IP Democracy - IP Democracy is a multi-media, blog-based forum that delivers innovative thinking about IP media and society.

The following blog post is from an independent writer and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.com.

The 463's Sean Garrett tipped me off to another fun poll conducted by his firm in conjunction with Zogby International. The survey of around 10,000 adults found out lots of interesting things that we probably didn't need to know in the first place, such as:

-- Around 11% of respondents said they would be "very likely" or "somewhat likely" to implant a device into their brains that enable them to use their minds to access the Internet if it could be done safely? Aside from the fact that the 463 is spinning this statistic as a low number ("only 11%" they say), who thought up this question?

--Around 25% of respondents think the Internet is a substitute for a significant other, at least for short periods of time.

On a more serious note, the poll also found an uncomfortably high but still minority level of support for government regulations that involve Internet content. Around 29% of the respondents think that TV-type indecency and obscenity regulations should be applied to the Internet and 25% think a ratings system should apply to Internet content."

Million Dollar Garbage - only in New York!!!

2007-10-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

from: Reuters.com

"NEW YORK (Reuters) - The treasure that a New York City woman saved from the trash -- a stolen masterpiece by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo -- is expected to go for as much as $1 million at auction next month.

Elizabeth Gibson will get a $15,000 reward for returning "Tres Personajes" ("Three People") to its rightful owners, as well as an undisclosed percentage of the auction price.

Nearly four years ago Gibson was on her way to coffee when she spotted the painting among garbage bags set out for morning collection in her Upper West Side neighborhood.

She walked by it at first but said she "immediately knew I had to go back. I knew I had to take it!"

"It was a huge, powerful and beautiful painting and I said to myself, 'It is wrong to be in the garbage,'" Gibson told Reuters on Tuesday.

Gibson, who had hung up the painting after her discovery, said she learned of its worth when research led her to the Web site of "Antiques Roadshow FYI," a companion program to the PBS show "Antiques Roadshow."

Sotheby's expert August Uribe had featured the painting on "Antiques Roadshow FYI" after it was stolen more than 20 years ago.

"Tres Personajes" was returned to its owners, who wish to remain anonymous, and is expected to fetch between $750,000 and $1 million when Sotheby's auctions it on November 20.

If Gibson had not acted so quickly after spying the painting, it might have been lost forever. A doorman nearby later told her that garbage collectors had come along just 20 minutes after she had left with her new finding."

Home Made Choppers in Africa

2007-10-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

from YahooNews
" KANO (AFP) - Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi, a 24-year-old physics undergraduate in northern Nigeria, takes old cars and motorbikes to pieces in the back yard at home and builds his own helicopters from the parts.
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"It took me eight months to build this one," he said, sweat pouring from his forehead as he filled the radiator of the banana yellow four-seater which he now parks in the grounds of his university.

The chopper, which has flown briefly on six occasions, is made from scrap aluminium that Abdullahi bought with the money he makes from computer and mobile phone repairs, and a donation from his father, who teaches at Kano's Bayero university.

It is powered by a second-hand 133 horsepower Honda Civic car engine and kitted out with seats from an old Toyota saloon car. Its other parts come from the carcass of a Boeing 747 which crashed near Kano some years ago.

For a four-seater it is a big aircraft, measuring twelve metres (39 feet) long, seven metres high by five wide. It has never attained an altitude of more than seven feet.

The cockpit consists of a push-button ignition, an accelerator lever between the seats which controls vertical thrust, a joystick that provides balance and bearing.

A small screen on the dashboard connects to a camera underneath the helicopter for ground vision, a set of six buttons adjusts the screen's brightness while a small transmitter is used for communication.

"You start it, allow it to run for a minute or two and you then shift the accelerator forward and the propeller on top begins to spin. The further you shift the accelerator the faster it goes and once you reach 300 rmp you press the joystick and it takes off," Abdullahi explained from the cockpit.

He said he learned the rudiments of flying a helicopter from the Internet and first got the idea of building one from the films he watches on television.

"I watched action movies a lot and I was fascinated by the way choppers fly. I decided it would be easier to build one than to build a car," he said pacing the premises of the security division of the university which he uses as hanger for his helicopter.

He hoped -- and still does hope -- that the Nigerian government and his wealthy compatriots would turn to him and stop placing orders with western manufacturers.

So far, however, government response to his chopper project has been underwhelming to say the least.

Although some government officials got very excited when they saw him conduct a demonstration flight in neighbouring Katsina state, Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has so far shown no interest in his aircraft.

"No one from the NCAA has come to see what I've done. We don't reward talent in this country," he lamented.

Abdullahi does admit that his first helicopter lacks "some basic facilities like devices for measuring atmospheric pressure, altitude, humidity and the like."

In a country with Nigeria's abysmal air safety record officials may be loath to gamble on one student's home-made helicopter.

But Abdullahi, undeterred, has started work on a new flying machine, which, he says, "will be a radical improvement on the first one in terms of sophistication and aesthetics."

Currently just a spindly metal frame in the back yard, the helicopter will be a two-seater and Abdullahi calculates it will be able to fly at an altitude of 15 feet for three hours at a stretch.

It will be powered by a brand new motor -- albeit Taiwan-manufactured and destined for the Jincheng motorbike so common on the streets of Kano."

Philly folks are Fugly

2007-10-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

from: Yahoo News
" PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Philadelphia is home to the least attractive people in the United States, a survey of visitors and residents showed on Friday.
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The city of more than 1.5 million people was also found to be among the least stylish, least active, least friendly and least worldly, according to the "America's Favorite Cities" survey by Travel & Leisure magazine and CNN Headline News.

About 60,000 people responded to the online survey -- at www.travelandleisure.com -- which ranked 25 cities in categories including shopping, food, culture, and cityscape, said Amy Farley, senior editor at the magazine.

For unattractiveness, Philadelphia just beat out Washington DC and Dallas/Fort Worth for the bottom spot. Miami and San Diego are home to the most attractive people, the poll found.

But Farley pointed out the results don't mean people in Philadelphia are ugly or the city is a bad place to visit.

"We were asking people to vote on attractiveness, not unattractiveness. Travel & Leisure editors believe there are a lot of attractive people in Philadelphia," she said.

"The relative attractiveness of its residents is only a minuscule factor in evaluating a city's merit."

Philadelphians' self-esteem has been undermined by national surveys showing they are among the fattest people in the United States. The American Obesity Association ranked the city in the top 10 for overweight people every year between 2000 and 2005.

And sporting pride in a city known for the fierce loyalty of its fans has been hurt by not having had a national champion in any of its four main sports since the 76ers won the National Basketball Association title in 1983."

Impending Web 2.0 Shakeout

2007-10-24T07:11:00.000-07:00

from: Paulgraham.com

"There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.

It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very expensive and made in small quantities. Then someone discovers how to make them cheaply; many more get built; and as a result they can be used in new ways.

Computers are a familiar example. When I was a kid, computers were big, expensive machines built one at a time. Now they're a commodity. Now we can stick computers in everything.

This pattern is very old. Most of the turning points in economic history are instances of it. It happened to steel in the 1850s, and to power in the 1780s. It happened to cloth manufacture in the thirteenth century, generating the wealth that later brought about the Renaissance. Agriculture itself was an instance of this pattern.

Now as well as being produced by startups, this pattern is happening to startups. It's so cheap to start web startups that orders of magnitudes more will be started. If the pattern holds true, that should cause dramatic changes.

1. Lots of Startups

So my first prediction about the future of web startups is pretty straightforward: there will be a lot of them. When starting a startup was expensive, you had to get the permission of investors to do it. Now the only threshold is courage.

Even that threshold is getting lower, as people watch others take the plunge and survive. In the last batch of startups we funded, we had several founders who said they'd thought of applying before, but weren't sure and got jobs instead. It was only after hearing reports of friends who'd done it that they decided to try it themselves.

Starting a startup is hard, but having a 9 to 5 job is hard too, and in some ways a worse kind of hard. In a startup you have lots of worries, but you don't have that feeling that your life is flying by like you do in a big company. Plus in a startup you could make much more money.

As word spreads that startups work, the number may grow to a point that would now seem surprising.

We now think of it as normal to have a job at a company, but this is the thinnest of historical veneers. Just two or three lifetimes ago, most people in what are now called industrialized countries lived by farming. So while it may seem surprising to propose that large numbers of people will change the way they make a living, it would be more surprising if they didn't.

2. Standardization

When technology makes something dramatically cheaper, standardization always follows. When you make things in large volumes you tend to standardize everything that doesn't need to change.

At Y Combinator we still only have four people, so we try to standardize everything. We could hire employees, but we want to be forced to figure out how to scale investing.

We often tell startups to release a minimal version one quickly, then let the needs of the users determine what to do next. In essense, let the market design the product. We've done the same thing ourselves. We think of the techniques we're developing for dealing with large numbers of startups as like software. Sometimes it literally is software, like Hacker News and our application system.

One of the most important things we've been working on standardizing are investment terms. Till now investment terms have been individually negotiated. This is a problem for founders, because it makes raising money take longer and cost more in legal fees. So as well as using the same paperwork for every deal we do, we've commissioned generic angel paperwork that all the startups we fund can use for future rounds.

Some investors will still want to cook up their own deal terms. Series A rounds, where you raise a million dollars or more, will be custom deals for the forseeable future. But I think angel rounds will start to be done mostly with standardized agreements. An angel who wants to insert a bunch of complicated terms into the agreement is probably not one you want anyway.

3. New Attitude to Acquisition

Another thing I see starting to get standardized is acquisitions. As the volume of startups increases, big companies will start to develop standardized procedures that make acquisitions little more work than hiring someone.

Google is the leader here, as in so many areas of technology. They buy a lot of startups— more than most people realize, because they only announce a fraction of them. And being Google, they're figuring out how to do it efficiently.

One problem they've solved is how to think about acquisitions. For most companies, acquisitions still carry some stigma of inadequacy. Companies do them because they have to, but there's usually some feeling they shouldn't have to—that their own programmers should be able to build everything they need.

Google's example should cure the rest of the world of this idea. Google has by far the best programmers of any public technology company. If they don't have a problem doing acquisitions, the others should have even less problem. However many Google does, Microsoft should do ten times as many.

One reason Google doesn't have a problem with acquisitions is that they know first-hand the quality of the people they can get that way. Larry and Sergey only started Google after making the rounds of the search engines trying to sell their idea and finding no takers. They've been the guys coming in to visit the big company, so they know who might be sitting across that conference table from them.

4. Riskier Strategies are Possible

Risk is always proportionate to reward. The way to get really big returns is to do things that seem crazy, like starting a new search engine in 1998, or turning down a billion dollar acquisition offer.

This has traditionally been a problem in venture funding. Founders and investors have different attitudes to risk. Knowing that risk is on average proportionate to reward, investors like risky strategies, while founders, who don't have a big enough sample size to care what's true on average, tend to be more conservative.

If startups are easy to start, this conflict goes away, because founders can start them younger, when it's rational to take more risk, and can start more startups total in their careers. When founders can do lots of startups, they can start to look at the world in the same portfolio-optimizing way as investors. And that means the overall amount of wealth created can be greater, because strategies can be riskier.

5. Younger, Nerdier Founders

If startups become a cheap commodity, more people will be able to have them, just as more people could have computers once microprocessors made them cheap. And in particular, younger and more technical founders will be able to start startups than could before.

Back when it cost a lot to start a startup, you had to convince investors to let you do it. And that required very different skills from actually doing the startup. If investors were perfect judges, the two would require exactly the same skills. But unfortunately most investors are terrible judges. I know because I see behind the scenes what an enormous amount of work it takes to raise money, and the amount of selling required in an industry is always inversely proportional to the judgement of the buyers.

Fortunately, if startups get cheaper to start, there's another way to convince investors. Instead of going to venture capitalists with a business plan and trying to convince them to fund it, you can get a product launched on a few tens of thousands of dollars of seed money from us or your uncle, and approach them with a working company instead of a plan for one. Then instead of having to seem smooth and confident, you can just point them to Alexa.

This way of convincing investors is better suited to hackers, who often went into technology in part because they felt uncomfortable with the amount of fakeness required in other fields.

6. Startup Hubs Will Persist

It might seem that if startups get cheap to start, it will mean the end of startup hubs like Silicon Valley. If all you need to start a startup is rent money, you should be able to do it anywhere.

This is kind of true and kind of false. It's true that you can now start a startup anywhere. But you have to do more with a startup than just start it. You have to make it succeed. And that is more likely to happen in a startup hub.

I've thought a lot about this question, and it seems to me the increasing cheapness of web startups will if anything increase the importance of startup hubs. The value of startup hubs, like centers for any kind of business, lies in something very old-fashioned: face to face meetings. No technology in the immediate future will replace walking down University Ave and running into a friend who tells you how to fix a bug that's been bothering you all weekend, or visiting a friend's startup down the street and ending up in a conversation with one of their investors.

The question of whether to be in a startup hub is like the question of whether to take outside investment. The question is not whether you need it, but whether it brings any advantage at all. Because anything that brings an advantage will give your competitors an advantage over you if they do it and you don't. So if you hear someone saying "we don't need to be in Silicon Valley," that use of the word "need" is a sign they're not even thinking about the question right.

And while startup hubs are as powerful magnets as ever, the increasing cheapness of starting a startup means the particles they're attracting are getting lighter. A startup now can be just a pair of 22 year old guys. A company like that can move much more easily than one with 10 people, half of whom have kids.

We know because we make people move for Y Combinator, and it doesn't seem to be a problem. The advantage of being able to work together face to face for three months outweighs the inconvenience of moving. Ask anyone who's done it.

The mobility of seed-stage startups means that seed funding is a national business. One of the most common emails we get is from people asking if we can help them set up a local clone of Y Combinator. But this just wouldn't work. Seed funding isn't regional, just as big research universities aren't.

Is seed funding not merely national, but international? Interesting question. There are signs it may be. We've had an ongoing stream of founders from outside the US, and they tend to do particularly well, because they're all people who were so determined to succeed that they were willing to move to another country to do it.

The more mobile startups get, the harder it would be to start new silicon valleys. If startups are mobile, the best local talent will go to the real Silicon Valley, and all they'll get at the local one will be the people who didn't have the energy to move.

This is not a nationalistic idea, incidentally. It's cities that compete, not countries. Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich.

7. Better Judgement Needed

If the number of startups increases dramatically, then the people whose job is to judge them are going to have to get better at it. I'm thinking particularly of investors and acquirers. We now get on the order of 1000 applications a year. What are we going to do if we get 10,000?

That's actually an alarming idea. But we'll figure out some kind of answer. We'll have to. It will probably involve writing some software, but fortunately we can do that.

Acquirers will also have to get better at picking winners. They generally do better than investors, because they pick later, when there's more performance to measure. But even at the most advanced acquirers, identifying companies to buy is extremely ad hoc, and completing the acquisition often involves a great deal of unneccessary friction.

I think acquirers may eventually have chief acquisition officers who will both identify good acquisitions and make the deals happen. At the moment those two functions are separate. Promising new startups are often discovered by developers. If someone powerful enough wants to buy them, the deal is handed over to corp dev guys to negotiate. It would be better if both were combined in one group, headed by someone with a technical background and some vision of what they wanted to accomplish. Maybe in the future big companies will have both a VP of Engineering responsible for technology developed in-house, and a CAO responsible for bringing technology in from outside.

At the moment, there is no one within big companies who gets in trouble when they buy a startup for $200 million that they could have bought earlier for $20 million. There should start to be someone who gets in trouble for that.

8. College Will Change

If the best hackers start their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college. Most of these changes will be for the better. I think the experience of college is warped in a bad way by the expectation that afterward you'll be judged by potential employers.

One change will be in the meaning of "after college," which will switch from when one graduates from college to when one leaves it. If you're starting your own company, why do you need a degree? We don't encourage people to start startups during college, but the best founders are certainly capable of it. Some of the most successful companies we've funded were started by undergrads.

I grew up in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I'm alarmed to be saying things like this, but there's nothing magical about a degree. There's nothing that magically changes after you take that last exam. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations. These can certainly affect your life—it's hard to get into grad school, or to get a work visa in the US, without an undergraduate degree—but tests like this will matter less and less.

As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will also start to matter less where they go to college. In a startup you're judged by users, and they don't care where you went to college. So in a world of startups, elite universities will play less of a role as gatekeepers. In the US it's a national scandal how easily children of rich parents game college admissions. But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be by reforming the universities but by going around them. We in the technology world are used to that sort of solution: you don't beat the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant.

The greatest value of universities is not the brand name or perhaps even the classes so much as the people you meet. If it becomes common to start a startup after college, students may start trying to maximize this. Instead of focusing on getting internships at companies they want to work for, they may start to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders.

What students do in their classes will change too. Instead of trying to get good grades to impress future employers, students will try to learn things. We're talking about some pretty dramatic changes here.

9. Lots of Competitors

If it gets easier to start a startup, it's easier for competitors too. That doesn't erase the advantage of increased cheapness, however. You're not all playing a zero-sum game. There's not some fixed number of startups that can succeed, regardless of how many are started.

In fact, I don't think there's any limit to the number of startups that could succeed. Startups succeed by creating wealth, which is the satisfaction of people's desires. And people's desires seem to be effectively infinite, at least in the short term.

What the increasing number of startups does mean is that you won't be able to sit on a good idea. Other people have your idea, and they'll be increasingly likely to do something about it.

10. Faster Advances

There's a good side to that, at least for consumers of technology. If people get right to work implementing ideas instead of sitting on them, technology will evolve faster.

Some kinds of innovations happen a company at a time, like the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution. There are some kinds of ideas that are so threatening that it's hard for big companies even to think of them. Look at what a hard time Microsoft is having discovering web apps. They're like a character in a movie that everyone in the audience can see something bad is about to happen to, but who can't see it himself. The big innovations that happen a company at a time will obviously happen faster if the rate of new companies increases.

But in fact there will be a double speed increase. People won't wait as long to act on new ideas, but also those ideas will increasingly be developed within startups rather than big companies. Which means technology will evolve faster per company as well.

Big companies are just not a good place to make things happen fast. I talked recently to a founder whose startup had been acquired by a big company. He was a precise sort of guy, so he'd measured their productivity before and after. He counted lines of code, which can be a dubious measure, but in this case was meaningful because it was the same group of programmers. He found they were one thirteenth as productive after the acquisition.

The company that bought them was not a particularly stupid one. I think what he was measuring was mostly the cost of bigness. I experienced this myself, and his number sounds about right. There's something about big companies that just sucks the energy out of you.

Imagine what all that energy could do if it were put to use. There is an enormous latent capacity in the world's hackers that most people don't even realize is there. That's the main reason we do Y Combinator: to let loose all this energy by making it easy for hackers to start their own startups.

A Series of Tubes

The process of starting startups is currently like the plumbing in an old house. The pipes are narrow and twisty, and there are leaks in every joint. In the future this mess will gradually be replaced by a single, huge pipe. The water will still have to get from A to B, but it will get there faster and without the risk of spraying out through some random leak.

This will change a lot of things for the better. In a big, straight pipe like that, the force of being measured by one's performance will propagate back through the whole system. Performance is always the ultimate test, but there are so many kinks in the plumbing now that most people are insulated from it most of the time. So you end up with a world in which high school students think they need to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students think they need to get good grades to impress employers, within which the employees waste most of their time in political battles, and from which consumers have to buy anyway because there are so few choices. Imagine if that sequence became a big, straight pipe. Then the effects of being measured by performance would propagate all the way back to high school, flushing out all the arbitrary stuff people are measured by now. That is the future of web startups."

CrowdInvesting: Marketocracy

2007-10-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

from Entrepreneur.com

"Marketocracy.com is more than a website where aspiring money managers can practice investing in stocks; the company also manages a very real and highly successful mutual fund. To make winning investment decisions, San Mateo, California-based Marketocracy examines which of its 80,000 members have the best fictional portfolios. About once a month, the top 100 are chosen as part of a paid advisory board. When an advisor makes a promising stock recommendation, Marketocracy vets the advice with all the members who have that stock in their online portfolios. While members don't play with real money, the company does. Co-founders Ken Kam, 47, and Mark Taguchi, 51, say the collective intelligence of their virtual advisory board has identified some hidden investment gems. "When that happens, I call [some of the board members] and ask, 'What is the conventional wisdom about this stock, and why is it wrong?'" says Kam.

The strategy seems to be working: The Marketocracy mutual fund has grown to $55 million under management and posted an 80 percent total return since its inception in November 2001."

Monkeys Kill Delhi's Mayor

2007-10-24T06:58:00.000-07:00

from inquirer.net

"NEW DELHI--The deputy mayor of the Indian capital died on Sunday from a fatal fall he suffered after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys, doctors said.

S.S. Bajwa, 52, suffered serious head injuries when he tried to fight off the monkeys which attacked him while he was alone on the terrace of his home on Saturday.

The councillor, who was elected deputy mayor earlier this year, belonged to India's main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party which faces flak from city courts for not doing enough to rid the capital of wild monkeys.

In May, federal lawmakers demanded protection from the marauding simians which often invade the parliament building, ministries and even break into the fortified complex that houses Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's office.

The defence ministry has, however, recruited bands of ferocious langurs trained to attack the smaller simians inside military facilities in New Delhi.

Several city residential districts petitioned local courts in 2001 to initiate steps to make New Delhi "monkey-free."

Culling is unacceptable to Hindus who revere the monkeys as a living link to the deity Hanuman, a monkey god who symbolizes strength."

Move over iphone - here come Gphone???

2007-09-02T01:38:00.000-07:00

From: Yahoo News

"Specialized blogs are all abuzz this week with rumors that Internet giant Google will soon launch the "Google Phone" or "GPhone," a cheap mobile phone equipped with a Google operating system.
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High-tech product specialist Engadget said a Google announcement would come next week, adding that a Google operating system would be tailor-made for the new cell phone.

According to another blog, CrunchGear, "Google is currently assessing over twenty (of Taiwan's) HTC models" and plans to launch its cell phone between January amd March of 2008.

Photographs of Google's touch-screen handset are already on the Internet, and according to Rizzn.com, it will cost a mere 100 dollars.

CrunchGear said the HTC/Google phone would have Google Talk enabled, allowing users to make free Internet phone calls.

The blog said the Google phone will not only be able to surf the net but also will include "a special version of Google Maps, compatible with built-in GPS, and compatibility with Gmail," Google's email service.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google has already shown its prototype to US companies AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, making it seem clear the Google Phone's launch will definitely take place in the United States.

Indian blog Rediff said the GPhone will be launched in two weeks simultaneously in the United States and Europe, adding that Google was talking with Indian telephone operators Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar, and that Bharat Sanchar Nigam could be one of the manufacturers.

Google has refused to make any comment on the rumors.

The company, at any rate, is interested in telecommunications. It recently announced it would participate in an "open" frequencies auction next January in the United States that could cost it billions of dollars.

The owner of open frequencies could create a mobile phone network across the country accessible to any cell phone, and not restricted to models chosen by US operators, as is now the case.

The Wall Street Journal quoted sources familiar with the dealings who said Google has invested several hundred million dollars in the project and that a phone will be launched in early 2008.

Google also intends to develop special applications for mobile phones, such as a search engine for ringtones, and offer free telephone subscriptions that would be financed through advertising.

The persistent rumors about a GPhone reflect gadget fans' enormous interest for the iPhone Apple launched in late June, which has since generated a lot of buzz on the internet.

The idea of a cheap, touch-screen, internet-adaptible GPhone promoted by a company that advocates "open" frequencies seems to be in direct competition with Apple's iPhone.

Greatly valued for its design, the iPhone has its high price (500-600 dollars) going against it, as well as its exclusive contract with AT&T.

Several hackers have recently boasted of having found the way to "unblock" the iPhone and make it work with other telephone operators, and some have promised to put their unblocking software up for sale on the internet soon."

Tough Job Interview

2007-09-02T01:27:00.001-07:00

At the end of a job interview, the head of human resources asks the young engineer fresh out of MIT, "What starting salary were you looking for?"

The engineer decides to shoot for the moon. "I’m thinking in the range of $125,000 a year or so, depending on the benefits package."

"Hmm," says the interviewer. "Well, what would you say to five weeks’ vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, a retirement fund with company matching to 50 percent of salary, and a company car leased every two years–say, a Porsche?"

The engineer gapes and says, "Wow! Are you kidding?"

"Yeah," replies the interviewer, "but you started it."

How Lucky Can You Get?

2007-09-02T00:46:00.000-07:00

From: Newsday
Couple Wins Millions in Lottery _ Twice

"Adeline and Eugene Angelo won $5 million Thursday after buying the winning ticket in last week's New York Lotto. In 1996, they won $2.5 million after splitting a $10 million jackpot with three other people.

Eugene Angelo, 81, said he and his wife would share their new fortune with their three sons and their families. Taking the lump-sum payment of $2.5 million, Eugene and Adeline and each of their sons will get about $513,000 before taxes.

"We're a little older, a little wiser and there are a few more of us, when you count the grandkids," Eugene Angelo said. "We're still the same old people. Still very excited. It's a great feeling."

Adeline Angelo, 74, a retired medical secretary, said she hoped the new money will "buy us good health and longevity."

With the winnings from their last big prize, the couple moved from the Bronx to Putnam County, about 50 miles north of the city. Eugene Angelo said they would continue to live modestly. And still buy lottery tickets, "just for the fun of it," his wife added.

Acting Lottery Director Gardner Gurney said this was only the third time in Lotto's history that a winner has hit the jackpot twice. The odds of winning just once were 22.5 million to one.

"The Angelos are living proof that lightning, or in this case, random luck, can strike twice," he said."

PrePaid Cab Fare

2007-09-01T22:23:00.000-07:00

From: Springwise

"Launched in eleven Minneapolis suburbs this month, Get Home Free is a flat rate, prepaid cab card that gets its holder home safely. Mainly targeted at teenagers and college students, the concept's initiators are aiming to help out kids who are stuck with car trouble, have been drinking, or whose ride home has fallen through. Cardholders place a call to the Get Home Free hotline, and a car is immediately dispatched to bring them home, no questions asked.

Teen drinking and driving is a serious issue. As reported in the Star Tribune: "According to the 2004 Minnesota Student Survey, 28 percent of high school seniors reported having driven after using alcohol or drugs at least once in the previous year. Also, almost 40 percent of seniors reported that they had ridden with someone who had been using substances." Having a Get Home Free card as an emergency back-up should help keep some of them off the road.

Cards can be purchased online for USD 64.99 and are valid throughout the Twin Cities metro area, with statewide expansion to all key cities in Minnesota planned for 2008, and to high school and college campuses in all 50 states by 2010. In order to offer the service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Get Home Free has partnered with Airport Taxi and Town Taxi, Minnesota's largest fleet of taxis with over 300 vehicles. To spread the word, Get Home Free will give away one card every month to a random MySpace friend. Useful and straightforward, this is one to start up locally."

How Much to Spend on a Suit

2007-08-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

From: the Wall Street Journal

What is too much to spend on a suit?

The question weighed on Barry Schwarz as he scanned the racks at Boyds men's store in Philadelphia, which were laden with $3,000 Brioni suits. "Their prices were just out of the world," recalls Mr. Schwarz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College.

We've all been there: A window display or a recommendation lures us into a store -- and we face unexpectedly astronomical price tags. It seems to happen more often these days as many luxury brands -- selling everything from $14,000 Ralph Lauren handbags to $899 Bugaboo baby strollers and $6,900 Beefeater barbecue grills -- push their top price points higher than they've ever gone before. What's priced below falls into that ever-expanding category: "affordable luxury."

Some people cut and run when confronted with prices that seem crazy. But many of us experience a sudden emotional-mathematical transformation. We set a new ceiling for a "reasonable" price. Disinclined to go all the way to buy the trophy, we instead settle for a consolation prize. Mr. Schwarz, a jeans-wearing type, walked out of Boyds with a suit that cost merely $800 -- the most he'd ever spent on an item of clothing.

"If you're in that world long enough, $800 stops even feeling like a lot of money," Mr. Schwarz says.

This concept is one of the reasons for the proliferation of $300 designer sunglasses these days. The fact that Ralph Lauren is charging $14,000 or so for an alligator "Ricky" handbag makes it easier for a consumer to justify in her mind paying $300 for a rather simple sweater. Many Chanel sunglass owners are actually would-be owners of Chanel suits. Something similar has happened to many owners of Tiffany keychains, Prada legwarmers, Coach wallets, and Frette tea towels.

When shoppers are confronted with prices they can't afford, a smart retailer will "move you right along to where you can salvage your pride," says Dan Hill, president of Sensory Logic, a Minneapolis consulting company that helps companies explore their sensory and emotional connections with customers.

Pride, Mr. Hill points out, "is a mixture of anger and happiness." That pretty much describes the whole shopping experience at those moments when we're outpriced (anger), then soothe ourselves with a smaller splurge (happiness).

In Mr. Hill's case, this played itself out in the purchase of a sweater when what he actually wanted was a certain pair of Jesus Jeans. A friend of mine remains sheepish about a smashing pair of high-waisted black Prada pants that seemed sensibly priced at $500 only after she had spent an hour eyeballing more expensive versions with the encouragement of a salesman at Barneys.

And yes, it's time to concede to my husband that I spent $87 on that T-shirt at Lost & Found in Los Angeles because I couldn't bring myself to spend $395 on a certain dress.

Given that accessories like sunglasses, fragrances, and logoed belts drive the sales of companies like Gucci and Louis Vuitton, such consolation prizes account for a very sizable chunk of the luxury business these days.

Indeed, this ploy is the soul of Las Vegas -- a town built on people who roll in on Southwest Airlines expecting to play $2 blackjack until they see the high rollers at the $200 tables. Next thing you know, they wake up in the baccarat lounge with their own private casino host and a stack of IOUs. After a while, it just doesn't seem like real money.

As for Prof. Schwarz, with his $800 suit, "I got sucked in. And I knew what was happening," he says. Mr. Schwarz has since written and spoken about this phenomenon to roughly 75 industry groups with audiences of as many as 8,000 over the past three years. He has found eager apostles in Microsoft, Google, the National Restaurant Association, General Electric, the Marines, Time Warner, the Dutch government, several health insurers, and Lehman Brothers.

Mr. Schwarz calls the top-priced goods "anchors." Anchors, he says, set the ceilings on prices of objects that don't have a clear value.

That is just about everything in luxury goods and fashion. In fact, that's one reason why some in the luxury fashion industry are irritated with retailers like Target and Zara: They're seen as setting the ceilings too low.

Retail-consulting guru Paco Underhill says, "This has been a strategy that goes back to the 17th century. You sold one thing to the king, but everyone in court had to have a lesser one." Today, we have Hermès, Fendi, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci. "There's the $500 bag in the window, and what you walk away with is the T-shirt," says Mr. Underhill. "It's the same strategy as putting the sports car in the window to sell the sedan in the back."

Still, luxury brands today have fine-tuned the strategy. The folks at Coach are masters of this. Look for a notably expensive bag in one of the company's flagship stores. Only one or two of them are available for sale, a company spokeswoman pointed out to me. But scores of similar, smaller, less-elaborate bags are nearby, primed to walk out the door. And if you can't even go that far, try the wallet or the keychain.

As convenient as it might be to accuse these manufacturers of gouging when they set prices so high on their top goods, there's nothing nefarious going on here. Clothing is one of the most democratic marketplaces around. There's always another store, another pair of pants to turn to.

Investment Banking: More Stressful Than Serving in Iraq

2007-08-30T15:24:00.000-07:00

From: the Wall Street Journal

"“War is War and hell is hell. Between the two, war is worse.”

So sayeth Hawkeye Pierce, the wisecracking head surgeon of M*A*S*H 4077. Does Dr. Pierce need to revise his thinking? Capt. J. Dow Covey might think so. Why? Well consider the following interchange as relayed in this recent report from Michael Totten of Michaeltotten.com, a blogger about the Middle East. Totten has been embedded with various U.S. military units in Iraq of late, filing dispatches about military progress in that country. In his latest report Totten is visiting an Iraqi police station and talking to Capt. Covey of New York City:

“Do you know the Weekly Standard magazine?” Captain Covey asked me.
“Of course,” I said.
“My buddy Tom Cotton was just written up there,” he said. “It was pretty cool seeing him in that magazine.”
“What did he do to get in the magazine?” I said.
“He’s like me,” he said. “He’s a Harvard Law grad who joined the Army after 9/11. I’m an attorney.”
“You’re an attorney?” I said. “What are you doing out here in Iraq?”
“I practiced law for three years,” he said, “then got into investment banking. When 9/11 happened I just had to sign up with the Army. Investment banking is a lot more stressful than this.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I said.
“No,” he said, and laughed. “I am totally serious.

Make Millions with Yo-Yo's

2007-08-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

From: Entrepreneur.com

"Imagine turning an idea you hatched during your morning shower into a $5 million business--in just three years. That is precisely how Don McNeill, the Wilmington, Delaware, inventor of You've Been Sentenced, conceived of his now wildly popular board game for kids ages 8 and up, which uses a deck of 540 pentagon-shaped cards to come up with ingenious and hilarious sentences.
"I started with an idea, one investor and $50,000, which was just enough to pay the bills," says McNeill, 43. "My daughter drew the prototype on her computer, and I called people I knew from a 20-year career selling commercial printing and gave them one-quarter of 1 percent of the company to help me produce the game."
It's a success story you can emulate. With the right idea, enough upfront cash and sufficient market research, it's possible to turn your dreams of entering the $22 billion toy industry into a viable career--and have fun doing it. But while brilliant ideas and cash are certainly paramount to success, toy industry insiders say it's the research that can make or break your toy empire. "The industry is strong, but you need to find holes in the marketplace and target them," says Chris Byrne, aka "The Toy Guy," an independent researcher and strategic marketing planner for the youth industry. "You also need to make sure that what you're planning to do is consistent with current trends and consumption patterns. For instance, right now the hottest toy trends are in electronics [like Nintendo DS, Webkinz and Wii], arts and crafts, and ‘narrative' toys that expand a child's cognitive activity and inspire the imagination, so these are definitely areas you should explore. It's always easier to go in the direction of the market than to buck a trend.""

read full story at http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2007/august/181676.html

Thief steals case, but misses $13,000 inside

2007-08-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

From Reuters:

BERLIN (Reuters) - A thief stole a briefcase and threw it away without noticing it contained 10,000 euros ($13,660) in cash, German authorities said Thursday.
"I think they'll be annoyed when they find out," said a spokesman for police in the western city of Duesseldorf.

The case's owner, a 57-year-old Iranian businessman, had reported it missing as he prepared to board a flight in Duesseldorf airport. A policewoman later found it -- ransacked, but still containing the two cash-filled envelopes.

Is Your iPhone Legal?

2007-08-30T09:06:00.000-07:00

From: the Wall Street Journal Online

"A 17-year-old “unlocked” the iPhone last week, making it possible to use the cell phone on networks operated by carriers other than its current exclusive carrier, AT&T. Now the lawyers and entrepreneurs are getting involved, highlighting how businesses are struggling to balance innovation with tech-savvy customers, and a legal system that isn’t designed for either.
Hackers have been trying to unlock the iPhone since it came out at the end of June. George Hotz, the teenager who finally pulled it off, just sold his unlocked iPhone to CertiCell, a mobile-phone repair company, for a Nissan 350Z and three new iPhones, according to the Washington Post. Hotz will also get a paid consulting job with the company.
Hotz could have held out for more. An anonymous entrepreneur is offering $100,000 for the rights to distribute software that unlocks the iPhone, according to Engadget, which establishes that there is – or at least should be – a market for it.
One person who probably hopes software that unlocks the iPhone becomes widely available is John Canning of Vermont. AT&T doesn’t provide service in Vermont or Alaska, and it has threatened to cancel the contracts of any residents in those states who buy an iPhone. Canning bought the iPhone anyway, according to USA Today. An AT&T spokesperson told USA Today that people who live in places where AT&T doesn’t offer service shouldn’t buy the iPhone – an attitude that the Business Technology Blog thinks largely explains why people are so eager to unlock the device.
The catch, of course, is that unlocking the iPhone is a legal gray area. There is an exception in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the major intellectual property law, which, believe it or not, specifies that it isn’t a crime to unlock a cell phone for personal use, according to an IDG New Service article. Several intellectual property lawyers told IDG that unlocking the iPhone for personal use was probably fine. But sharing the method with others – either for profit or not – is a gray area, the lawyers said, largely because no one has ever tried to use a copyright to enforce an exclusive contract. It may be legal, the lawyers say, but it is more or less inviting a lawsuit. Certainly, AT&T has every incentive to fight people who try to distribute the secret of unlocking the iPhone, since it risks losing customers otherwise. And, in fact, an Irish man who has also unlocked the iPhone says that he heard from AT&T lawyers this past weekend. "

Are you a has-been rocker? Finance your comeback album here!

2007-08-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

From: the Wall Street Journal

LONDON -- Past-their-prime rock bands are used to being ignored by record labels and mocked by the music press. But, in Britain, they've found a new groupie: venture capital.
A boutique London investment bank, Ingenious Media PLC, is financing comeback albums. Last month, it signed UB40, a reggae band that had a No. 1 hit in 1988 with the song "Red Red Wine." Other artists working on CDs for Ingenious include veteran rocker Peter Gabriel, and the techno punk band the Prodigy.
The firm, which specializes in media and entertainment deals, pays for the acts' music production, marketing and CD distribution. Its partners came up with the idea to start two funds to back faded groups three years ago. It has raised $79 million.
Reggae band UB40 -- in 1987, at left and more recently, above -- is releasing an album that's financed by Ingenious Media, a boutique investment bank.
Fans often fill up concert venues to hear older acts perform their hits, but they typically shun their new record releases. Ingenious figured with the music industry suffering its worst downturn ever, record companies were reducing spending -- and some veteran acts would be eager for more support.
Duncan Reid, commercial director at Ingenious, says it targets British bands, from punk to pop, who aren't signed to big-name labels. Ingenious calculates that there is less upside with these old groups (which is often why record labels pass) but less risk of a bomb.
Ingenious and the artist or artist's manager discuss distribution and marketing strategies together and then hire third parties to do those tasks. "We are in there giving the benefit of our experience and advising and overseeing," Mr. Reid says. Ingenious' records are released globally.
So far, Ingenious has financed 15 albums and agreed to pay for seven more, spending roughly between $400,000 and $2 million each, according to regulatory filings. From that pipeline, two have been released. One, by a Welsh grunge band called The Heights, sold poorly. The other, by 1990s band Travis, is selling reasonably well, Ingenious says. Record labels typically expect 5% of their acts to be profitable.
Ingenious set up two music funds and receives an annual fee for managing the funds and 20% of any profits. But the funds aren't generating profits yet. Tax consultants say that most people are attracted because under United Kingdom law investors in the funds don't have to pay tax on any profits and get a one-time discount on their overall tax bill.
Ingenious's Mr. Reid, a former tax accountant himself, takes an approach to scouting that befits his graying stars. Mr. Reid, 49, doesn't go to concerts to check out bands. Instead, he and his partners at Ingenious rely on sources in the music industry to introduce them to acts looking for financing. The company has also found some new bands through contacts at independent labels.
"We spent awhile putting the word out there that we were doing these deals," Mr. Reid says.
UB40's investment advisers, Coutts, a London-based unit of Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, suggested the band see if Ingenious would fund it. UB40's contract with EMI Group PLC's Virgin label ended in 2005. Their business manager, Lanval Storrod, says the eight band members felt other record companies weren't effective at promoting "heritage" musicians -- an industry term for performers over 40.
"The biggest problem for heritage bands is record labels tend to market everyone the same whether they are a boy band or have been around 20 years," says Mr. Storrod. An EMI spokesman said it has a good relationship with UB40.
As one of the world's best-selling reggae bands, UB40's members thought the group was a good bet because sales of its new album would likely cover production and marketing costs even if it wasn't a hit, Mr. Storrod says. The band had an idea that could be tough to market: Its new CD would focus on political and social issues.
Ingenious put up $2 million to make, distribute and promote the album, which is scheduled for release at the end of the year or early next year. Any initial profits will go to the Ingenious fund. Once the fund's investment has been paid back, the fund and UB40 will share any additional profits.
One aspect UB40 likes about the deal: Unlike a record label, Ingenious executives haven't asked for an update on the album or visited their recording studio in Birmingham.
Record labels, hit by rampant piracy and falling profits, have been cutting back on the number of bands they support. With the power of the big record companies diminishing, bands are trying new ways to put out music.
After a 40-year relationship with EMI's Capitol Records, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney announced in March he would join Starbucks Corp.'s label, Hear Music. Mr. McCartney released an album through 10,000 Starbucks coffee stores in June. The release sold 500,000 copies by early August according to Nielsen Soundscan.
In the U.S., some rock acts are also drawing on private-equity support. A & M/Octone Records, based in New York, has backed the rock band Maroon 5 and several other groups. The label is a joint venture with Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group and several private investors.
Big record companies say they aren't threatened by the efforts to produce music without them. Bands "are not equipped with the necessary specialist skills to take care of business" such as hiring producers, designers, photographers and publicists, says Max Hole, an executive vice president at Universal Music Group International, the overseas arm of the world's largest music company by market share. "We are experts in providing these services and skills, which allows the artist to create and make music."
Ingenious was founded in 1998 by theater producer Andrew Lloyd Webber's accountant, Patrick McKenna, a former partner at accounting firm Deloitte & Touche. One of Mr. McKenna's early clients at Deloitte was English singer Peter Gabriel. The two men became friends, and Mr. Gabriel invested some of his own money in the Ingenious music venture-capital funds.
The two men agreed Ingenious would invest in Mr. Gabriel's next album, and in January, Ingenious paid $2 million for a 24.95% stake in Mr. Gabriel's 14th album, scheduled to be released next year. The deal gives Mr. Gabriel control over promotion and distribution of the still-untitled album in North America. Elsewhere, Mr. Gabriel is still signed to the Virgin record label.
Ingenious doesn't ask its rock stars to act like rock stars, something that appeals to the 57-year-old Mr. Gabriel, says Mike Large, chief operating officer of Peter Gabriel's management company, Real World Holdings Ltd. Musicians of Mr. Gabriel's age and experience are "not hungry for the circus of publicity, touring and autograph signing," he says.
"We know we have a great fan base who will buy the record if you tell them it's out there," Mr. Large says.
Dave Goldberg, a music entrepreneur at Benchmark Capital, a U.S. venture-capital investor, says it's too early to say if Ingenious's approach will take off in the U.S. "But we are going to see more and more of these different ways of creating financing for bands," he says.

Sharing Errands Online

2007-08-30T07:43:00.000-07:00

From Springwise:

"It's no secret that one can save time, money and gas by doubling up on errands or swapping to-do's with people in other locations to cut down on driving. But the prospect of divvying up tasks among friends, family and coworkers might seem like more trouble than it's worth. That's where Sherrands comes in—a new tool that links to-do lists of close friends and associates in a secure online environment to facilitate errand sharing.
Here's how this lifehack works: customers sign up for subscriptions and invite others to join. Users set up lists of other members they trust to run their errands—each user can have multiple lists. They then enter information about their errands, including information on mileage and time, which can be used to calculate how much gas and time users are saving using the site. Once an errand is entered, the user can assign it to one or more lists, and each member on that list is alerted via email. If the errand happens to be convenient to one of those members, he or she can accept it, and an email notification will let the person know. Sherrands also lets users create offers—alerting a list of members that you will be running to a particular part of town, for instance, and offering to help with errands in that area for anyone who needs it. During its current testing phase, the service is free, however Sherrands will begin charging for use once testing is complete.
While its interface could be more appealing, the idea is promising. Sherrands offers a handy solution to coordinating what otherwise might take a tangled web of phone calls and individual emails, making it an efficient way to save time and spare the environment to boot. It could be an attractive concept for business owners, too, especially if adapted for project management purposes."

A Social Platform for Women

2007-08-30T07:40:00.000-07:00

From http://www.sk-rt.com/

What is sk*rt anyway?

sk*rt is the place to find and/or link to anything and everything on the Web that you'd like to share. If sk*rt users like what you submit, they'll vote for it. The more votes, the more likely your link will make it to the front page. Links on the front page are seen by everybody and get lots of love. The front page content is ever-changing and always cool. Of course, no one person can keep track of every cool thing out there. So sk*rt users bring the content. Vote for the content. Determine what's good and what's bad. sk*rt works to make sure you don't miss any of the good stuff.

When a Porn Star Uses Your Name...

2007-08-30T07:16:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, I've never had this problem, but you never know...

From KiroTV.com

A Houston-area woman filed a lawsuit against a porn star, claiming she stole her name.
Lara Madden, 25, is an actress in the pornography industry, Houston TV station KPRC reported. She is a former Houstonian who has appeared in about a dozen X-rated movies under the stage name "Syvette Wimberly." That's the problem.
The real Syvette Wimberly was one of Madden's classmates at Kingwood High School. The women knew each other in the ninth grade.
Wimberly said she does not believe it's a coincidence that her old classmate is now using her name.
"I imagine she knew the name and maybe thought it sounded catchy and was unique," Wimberly said.
Wimberly is suing Madden for invasion of privacy and emotional distress.
"Really on a weekly, if not daily basis, my client has had to deal with odd phone calls, former classmates that didn't know her that well sending her e-mails about whether she's now in the adult film industry and just a general lack of safety for her," attorney Caj D. Boatwright said.
Wimberly is also suing Vivid Entertainment, the porn distributor that produced Madden's videos.
She's asking for monetary damages and an injunction to stop Madden from using her name.
KPRC legal analyst Brian Wice said that's an appeal likely to win sympathy from a jury if the case goes to trial.
"It's not like they pulled the name "Jane Doe" or "Barbara Smith" out of thin air. They pulled a name that's fairly peculiar to one woman in Harris County, Texas, and that's the kind of coincidence or lack of coincidence that's going to get somebody's attention in this building behind us," Wice said.
Wimberly declined to talk on camera. Her attorney said she's already received more publicity than she wanted in the first place.
Calls to Madden and Vivid Entertainment for comment were not returned.

How To Make Money Giving Away Something For Free

2007-08-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

From Springwise:

"http://www.freehandads.com/
Advertisers competing for the much desired attention of the college-aged set now have another opportunity to get their ads in the hands of students—and hold their interest for up to 90 minutes. FreeHand Advertising distributes free note-taking paper to students on their way to class. Each page is branded with the same type of horizontal ad you see on websites, only these are visible for at least the duration of a college lecture, and longer if students refer back to their notes (as they should).
FreeHand agents operate at 90 of the biggest college campuses in the United States, reaching up to 3,500,000 students in 32 states, including all major cities. Businesses can select which campuses they want to market to, for local or nationwide campaigns, or to a targeted demographic. Thorough post-campaign reports detail how many sheets were distributed and even include pictures of agents handing them out to students.
Ads can be used to gain visibility, offer coupons, or promote sales, grand openings or other events. Colored and recycled papers are also available, and larger images can be displayed as watermarks. With so many brands and marketers reaching out to this market, note paper is an innovative low-tech solution for grabbing their attention. And free love—giving away ad-sponsored anything—is generally appreciated by those on the receiving side, too."

Man loses top of his head in brain operation

2007-08-30T07:10:00.000-07:00

From Reuters:

A German court has awarded 3,000 euros ($4,100) in damages to a man who had to have the top of his skull replaced with plastic because of a faulty hospital fridge.

Doctors removed the top of the man's head and put it in cold storage while they operated on his brain, the court in the western city of Koblenz said Tuesday.

Because the refrigerator was defective, the section of skull was not kept cool enough and could not be reattached. Doctors replaced the bone with a plastic prosthesis.

The man sought compensation of at least 20,000 euros on the grounds that the prosthesis caused him headaches, affected his balance and made him unduly sensitivity to the weather.
Following consultations with experts, the court found that the operation had caused the man's discomfort, not the loss of the top of his skull.

Compensation of 3,000 euros was "appropriate and sufficient," it said.

"The experts consulted by the court concluded the new skull roof was better than the original," a court spokesman said.

Phantom professor claims salary for 15 years

2007-08-30T07:04:00.002-07:00

From Reuters:

A French tax official cheated the government out of 600,000 euros ($820,000) by creating a phantom identity as a university professor and claiming a salary for some 15 years, the government said Monday.

Education Ministry officials uncovered the scam in June and began legal and disciplinary action immediately, Budget Minister Eric Woerth said in a statement.

He said he "desired action to be undertaken urgently to prevent a recurrence of an abuse of this kind."

Breeding a $5,000 fish

2007-08-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

From: Fortune Small Business

Penns Grove, N.J. (FSB Magazine) -- I am the CEO of Parkway Corp., a Philadelphia company that operates 100 parking facilities in the U.S. My second business, breeding koi, started as a hobby. I bought about 40, to study what makes these beautiful fish so valuable. What is the best body shape? Is that brilliant red pattern going to disappear in six months, leaving the customer with an inferior fish? Many dealers base a koi's price on what it looks like today. We grade them according to what they'll look like over the years.
I launched this operation in southern New Jersey in 2002. Most U.S. koi breeders sell to the mass market; I saw an opportunity to breed better-quality fish for serious hobbyists. Most U.S. dealers fly to Japan and buy everything but tategoi, the highest-quality koi. They are too expensive. A five-inch fish, which will live about 50 years, costs more than $1,400 wholesale.

At Quality Koi (qualitykoi.com) we sell that same fish for less than $1,000. We breed 40 types of koi and sell 20,000 to 30,000 fish a year, 90% of which we sell wholesale to dealers. Their customers are hobbyists, who pay $15 to $5,000 a fish. Some have won prizes in fish shows against Japanese competitors. I've invested more in the farm than I ever thought I would. We expect to turn an operating profit at the end of this year, with revenues exceeding $500,000.
We've had many surprises. Four years ago thousands of fish disappeared in one day. We tested the water and found nothing wrong. A Japanese consultant visited and told us, "You have to walk the ponds." With each step, you release methane trapped beneath the clay bottom. Unless you release the gas regularly, it can erupt with such force that it disintegrates the fish. After five years we're still learning how to run the farm. - As told to Caroline Tiger

Why You Are A Fool If You Believe In Coming Web 2.0 Crash

2007-08-25T22:29:00.000-07:00

An article below on the speculation of a Web 2.0 crash. I've always wondered what the demand curve for Web 2.0 might look like; it always seemed (and still seems) like there are just too many sites chasing too few users. Whereas I'm all for the democratization of content and all that, it seems to me that all the social goals that could possibly be satisfied by social software and applications soon will be, if they haven't already. Is that what we'll be calling Web 3.0? Whatever's next?

From: Aojon.com

"Fools I tell you, all fools! (but if I’m wrong, you’re still a fool)

People seem to be under the impression that a big ‘ol crash of Web 2.0 is going to rock the tech and Internet marketing industries, hardcore. We’re talking about predictions that are being compared to the dot com crash of the late 90’s and early 2001′ish. Are you guys serious?! People are also predicting left and right, on their blogs, on forums, in magazines, at networking or social events, pretty much anywhere you can think of, there are people saying “it’s coming, watch out for it”. Guess what? They are all wrong.

This is exactly what I’m talking about when I bitch about people being fake or not knowing what the hell they are talking about. It’s really true too. Because anyone with a brain can see that the dot com crash back in the pioneering days of the Internet explosion and the rash of Web 2.0 sites being launched (almost all of them in beta) are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM ONE ANOTHER.

First off, I love the Web 2.0 start up and website launches going on. I like them because they are interesting, entertaining, and many of the ideas really are unique and interesting. But just like communism, many of them sound awesome on paper but are crap in reality and just won’t work out. But hey, that’s how business is. The important thing is that you tried it and failed, there’s no shame in that. I’d much rather try and fail, than wonder years later if it could have worked, and let it bug me like that. That’s the worst.

Secondly, here’s why there won’t be a Web 2.0 crash…. The industry is profitable. Yep. That’s why. I promise you, it’s really that simple. Sure there are hundreds of Web 2.0 sites and services and free stuff and this and that coming out every day it seems, but when you boil it down to the cold hard facts, they aren’t being injected with hundreds of millions of investment capital like the companies of the dot bomb era. The large majority of these 2.0′ers are starting up with very little of their own cash or none at all, so if they fail, the cash lost is only for those directly involved in the company, no outsiders really. Another thing that makes it very tough to cause a catastrophic crash is that many of these 2.0′ers are also just spin-off services or projects by small and medium profitable companies testing the waters with a subsidiary or independent product/service under the primary company’s umbrella. So even if the project fails, no one is depending on it to take the company to the next level, and there are no salaries or budgets that are relying on how much cash it makes. If it fails, it fails, and it won’t hurt anything except a few egos.

So let’s do a quick recap so you can steal my idea and regurgitate it on your blogs, forums, networking and social events, etc etc.

There will be no 2.0 crash because:

Hundreds of millions of dollars from investors are not being injected into these 2.0 companies and projects.
The average 2.0 start-up company or project takes $10,000 or less to build (and that’s the expensive route).
The industries they are creating sites/projects for are not depending on them for anything (they are more or less just a cute idea to help automate or connect you with something you probably don’t need anyway).
The people who are independently creating the 2.0 sites and projects are individuals investing their own cash into it, there aren’t many outside investors involved, nothing even remotely close to the dot-com rush and bust, plus if it bombs, the people inside the company are the only losers, doesn’t really effect anyone on the outside. (sorry, but you won’t be missed, and tragically for you, you’ll most likely be forgotten just as quickly).
The companies creating small 2.0 projects or subsidiary projects in a Web 2.0 package are not putting shit piles of cash into it, therefor their current business assets and cash are not fueled by the success or demise of the 2.0 deal, and if it does fail, it will benefit more as a tax write-off/loss than if it were a success.
They have lovely colors and design beauty attached to them, and NOTHING so beautiful looking can ever die!! (I’m not a designer, but that’s what I would imagine they would say/think — suckers!)
Ajax is not overrated, yet!
Google has not paid more than $2B for one of them yet.
They are fun to watch going from start-up, to beta, to waiting to get out of beta, to waiting some more, to dying without anyone giving a crap about them being around in the first place!
People outside of the tech and Internet marketing industry have no idea what Web 2.0 is! If the whole damn thing came tumbling down, they wouldn’t even notice it. Hell, they’d probably think you were talking about stuff from 1999.

This is why I know there won’t be a crash of 2.0 sites and projects…. because no one would care! Web 2.0 in my mind (and a warped mine it is folks) is a form of creativity mixed in with some business goals and potential achievements. I hope it stays around for a long time, and if the design of it changes, then we’ll call it Web 3.0, Web 4.0, etc. But when you strip away the sweet designs, all your left with is just a bunch of concepts, some cool, some retarded, some innovative, some not worth mentioning with a straight face, but all creative to some degree, and that’s what I like about it.

The end. Story time is over. Have a goodnight."

A Billion Dollars in Peer-to-Peer Lending

2007-08-25T20:26:00.000-07:00

Below are a few new social lending sites. Much of the debate over the viability of technologically enabled finance between peers hinges on the adequacy of information as a substitute for intermediation. Carried to its logical extreme, the peer to peer aggregation model could conceivably apply to a variety of asset classes. I'm curious as to what Prosper and Zopa's default rate are; seems like over time that would be a significant indicator as to the survivability of these types of sites.

From: Springwise

"A study by Online Banking Report predicts that by 2011 person-to-person lending in the US could surpass 100,000 loans a year, worth more than USD 1 billion. Unlike eBay, which can connect buyers and sellers from around the world, peer to peer lending is generally bound by local financial regulations. Which means there's ample room for national or regional versions. A quick run-down of our most recent spottings from the realm of social lending:

Boober | Launched last month, Boober is bringing peer to peer lending to The Netherlands. The start-up works much like Zopa and Prosper, with prospective borrowers listing the amount they want to borrow, their credit rating, purpose of the loan, interest rate they're willing to pay, etc. Credit ratings are determined by credit report agency Experian. And loans to AA and AAA borrowers are guaranteed by debt collectors Intrum Justitia, at 90% and 99.5% respectively. Investors are required to distribute their capital over at least 10 borrowers to minimize risk. Borrowers pay EUR 19.95 to have their credit rating determined, and if their loan is funded, they pay Boober a yearly fee of 0.5% of the loan. Investors pay a yearly fee of 0.5% over the funds they've invested, as well as an annual contribution of EUR 9.95.

Boober's founder, Guus Drijver, doesn't hesitate to share his feelings about why Boober is better than the Big Banks: "Boober doesn't work with hidden costs and is completely transparent. We don't sponsor yacht races or soccer teams, and don't have expensive headquarters or pay thousands of people high salaries." Boober isn't alone in this sentiment; many consumers are equally discontent with banks and their high profit margins, driving interest in alternatives like p2p lending. After a beta phase in The Netherlands, Boober hopes to expand to Belgium and Germany.

Website: www.boober.nl / Contact: www.boober.nl/?lang=nl&content=contact.htm

Smava | In Germany, Boober will have to compete against Smava, which launched earlier this month. Smava currently allows loans of EUR 500 to 10,000. The company charges borrowers a 1% fee of the loan amount and EUR 10 for a credit check. Unlike Boober, Smava is following Prosper's lead by encouraging borrowers to form groups. By adding a level of peer pressure and control, tight-knit groups help lower the risk of defaults, boosting a group's reputation and attracting lenders at better rates. Smava's backers include Stefan Glänzer of Last.fm and ricardo.de.

Website: www.smava.de / Contact: www.smava.de/Startseite-223-972-Kontakt.html

CommunityLend | Set to launch in Fall 2007, CommunityLend hopes to revolutionize the way lending works in Canada. A test phase over the next few months will let users set up profiles, manage loans, bid on auctions and create groups without using real money. One to watch! Or invest in ;-)

Website: www.communitylend.com / Contact: info@communitylend.com

Wiseclerk.com | Meanwhile, feeder businesses are starting to pop up, too. Just as eBay spawned offline drop-off shops to facilitate online selling, Prosper has led to the creation of Wiseclerk.com, which aims to provide extra information to help borrowers and lenders make smart decisions: "With currently approx. 103,432 listings in over 989 groups created by over 46,779 borrowers and over 8899 loans successfully funded, it is hard to identify overall trends and find the pearls. Wiseclerk.com is dedicated to serve as an automated clerk, offering you the information you need."

Website: www.wiseclerk.com / Contact: info@wiseclerk.com"

An Easy Way to Increase Your Alexa Ranking

2007-08-25T15:05:00.000-07:00

Easy Way to increase Alexa Ranking

Here are a few ways to increase your Alexa ranking:

1. Download the alexa toolbar and instal it (it is actually pretty interesting)

2. Download and place one of the alexa site ranking things on your frontpage.

3. VISIT YOUR OWN SITE EVERY DAY AND SURF YOUR SITE.

You will see your site go from 4,000,000 to 800,000 in just one week.

If you have more than one computer (work,home,laptop). Download the Alexa toolbar on all of them and surf your own site everyday, be sure to hit about everypage.

Free Daily Pays Bloggers

2007-08-25T14:48:00.000-07:00

From: Springwise

"Understanding that citizen journalists are just as happy to be paid for their work as editors on a newspaper's payroll, the Swedish version of Metro newspaper recently launched get-paid-per-view blogging.

Anyone can set up a blog at Metrobloggen.se, which integrates blog creation tools with a system for micro-payments. As soon as an individual blog achieves 5,000 pageviews per month, Metro sets up a bank account and sends the author a MasterCard that's credited with 150 Swedish kronor (USD 20 / EUR 16). Adhering to fiscal regulations, the media company deducts social security fees and withholds income tax.

A number of popular metrobloggers previously published their own blogs on other platforms or their own websites. By switching to metrobloggen.se, they not only cash in on their writing efforts, but also have the chance to reach a larger audience, since strong blog content will be cross-published in Metro Sweden’s print edition and on metro.se, dishing up a blogger's opinions to over a million readers.

Metro Sweden, part of the international Metro conglomerate of free daily newspapers, has found a way to reward members of Generation C for the content they create. In doing so, they're attracting dedicated bloggers and fleshing out the paper's online content, allowing Metro to serve up more online ads. Their payment model is one to follow if you're in publishing or media. For more on paying consumers for their creative output, check out trendwatching.com's Generation C(ash)."

100+ Free blog traffic links

2007-08-25T14:27:00.000-07:00

From: blogginmix.com

Submitting articles to Article Directories is probably one of the best ways to get links to your blog or website. Getting your articles published on Article Directories will have a big impact on your blog's performance. In fact, several Search Engine Optimizers make it a habit to submit an article to article directories once every week.

What benefits do you get from submitting articles to Article Directories?

1. LINKS.
Most article directories have good page ranking so getting links from them is definitely worth your time.

2. Get MORE LINKS
Articles submitted to article directories are usually free to be republished on other blogs or websites. To do this however, bloggers who will republish your article need to include the link to your profile. As this happens, links to your blog increases.

3. INCREASE TRAFFIC
Submitting articles to Article Directories is a good way to reach a wider audience. One of the articles I have submitted to Article Directories was an article about Blogging Mix. In the same article, I have talked about what Blogging Mix is all about and what people can expect from BloggingMix.com. After my article was submitted and was approved by the Article Directories, I have noticed an increase in the number of links to my blog and a considerable rise in my traffic.

I'm sure that the three benefits mentioned above are enough motivation for you to make your own article and submit it to Article Directories. Here's a list of reminders to keep in mind when making an article to submit in article directories.

1. Always think of your readers. Remember that most people will read your article looking for something beneficial to them. Why would they read your article if there's nothing in it for them?

2. Make it valuable and worthwhile. To make your article valuable, you should give useful and helpful information to your readers. Once your readers find out that your article is valuable, they'll be more than glad to share it to their friends, link to your post or republish it on their blogs.

3. Keep your article short and simple. Making a long post is discouraging to most people. According to studies, people tend to skip or scan long articles but will most likely read the shorter ones. I advice you to use at most 1000 words when you make an article for submission to article directories.

4. Write clearly. Use simple words and avoid perplex or compounded sentences. Remember that you have to send a message across to your readers and not to confuse them.

5. Write about topics related to your blog. When you submit articles to Article Directories, do not write something not related to your blog. Remember that your article serves as a window to your blog. It should give your readers an idea of what to expect when they check to your blog. You should also submit articles that are related to your blog to earn authority. Concentrating your topic on a certain area of knowledge will be an easier way to gain authority than blogging about every possible 'bloggable' topic.

6. Use your keywords and keyphrases in your article. Keywords and keyphrases should be used without impeding clarity.

7. Create links to your post strategically. Some article directories allow you to have more than 5 links, take advantage of it and link to your posts. You can also decide to link to your posts at the end of the article as a related post.

8. Remember to proof read your article before you submit it. An article submitted that is full of grammatical errors and misspelled words is usually rejected by directories. Carefully check your article before submission. Bear in mind that they serve as a representatives of your blog. If the article you have submitted is useful, readers will be tempted to read some more. They will then visit your blog through the links you've provided.

To make your submission convenient, I have included a list of links to Article Directories below. Remember the pointers I have mentioned when making an article for submission to article directories. Here's the list, please help yourself.

Article Directory - First Priority (FIVE STAR)

Ultimatearticledirectory.com

Submityournewarticle.com

Netbiz4cash.com

Solarblur.com

Networkmarketingsuccess.com

Articlesphere.com

article-content-king.com

Webhosting-articles.com

Articlesubmissions.com

Awebhostingprovider.com

Article Directory - Second Priority (FOUR STAR AND LESS)

Toparticles.net

Organic-rankings.com

Theselfimprovementsite.com

Workathomearticles.net

Webmastertraffictools.com

Kategilby.co.uk

Commonconnections.com

Internethomebusinessarticles.com

Tigrafix.com

Allfreelancework.com

Articlefinders.com

Business-opportunity.biz

Website-traffic.info

Work-at-home-iowa.com

Website-promotion-services.com

Uniterra.com

Webmomz.com

OpportunityUpdate.com

Marketing-of-training.com

Bestparentingresources.com

Boconline.com

Businesstoolchest.com

Midamericapublishing.com

Obp.com

Opportunityupdate.com

Sales-masters-world.com

Home-business-directory.com

Articlesubmissions.com

1st-in-articles.com

Home-business-income.net

Home-business-newsletter.com

Home-opportunities.com

Allthewebsites.org

Smallbusinesshowto.com

Williammcdermott.com

Top-web-marketing.com

Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

2007-08-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, I haven't adhered to these with enough discipline, but here are some excellent tips from seomoz.org:

"

Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
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Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).
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Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).
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Tag Your Content
Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.
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Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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Link Intelligently
When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etitquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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Invite Guest Bloggers
Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowedging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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Eschew Advertising (Until You're Popular)
I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That's not to say that contextual advertising can't work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don't get me wrong - it's unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you'll have the same impression - low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link - you definitely don't want that limitation while you're still trying to get established.
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Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occassional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bulllet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestable block of content.
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Cover Topics that Need Attention
In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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Pay Attention to Your Analytics
Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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Use a Human Voice
Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
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Archive Effectively
The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
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Implement Smart URLs
The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you'll find on the page. I don't like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes - I know I'm not walking the talk here, and hopefully it's something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn't hurt, I'd take issue - just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we've worked with.
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Reveal as Much as Possible
The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occassional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors.
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Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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Build a Brand
Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occassional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be offputting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write."

Free Blog Submission Directories and Search Engine Links

2007-08-25T14:17:00.000-07:00

From: bloggingmix.com

Have you heard of these advertisements before? "Free submission of your Blog or Website to 1000 Blog Directories or 1000 Search Engine Directories or 1000 RSS Directories. " All you need to do is sign up by providing your name and email address. Others will even ask you your home address and will require a telephone number.

Because you are new to blogging, and that you have heard from other bloggers that you should submit your blog to different directories to improve your traffic, you applied for the free submission without giving a second thought. Worse, you gave your real name, your real address, email address and your mobile phone.

After you submitted your blog from a website that promises your blog to be included to 1000 Blog, Search Engine or RSS Directories, you've waited expecting that your blog's traffic will increase. After a week or so you've found out that your email has been receiving tons of spams and junk mails. From time to time, you've been receiving anonymous calls from companies promoting their products and services. And all of a sudden, your mailbox is full of letters much of which is advertisement. Did you ask for it? Sure you did but you weren't aware of it. In the end, your mails and incoming calls have increased but the traffic to your blog did not. Very sad, isn't it?

The best words to describe your situation... 'YOU HAVE BEEN SCAMMED! '.

Is it possible that these websites can submit my Blog to 1000 Directories?

SURE IT IS POSSIBLE… but they need to do it manually. However, with the thousands of requests they receive everyday, do you think they can do it? "But they said they have an effective software program that will submit my blog to 1000 Directories." Come on, no one will advertise a product saying that it will not work. Scammers are known to promise spectacular benefits but they never really exist.

Why is it impossible to submit your URL to 1000 Directories using a software program?

Let me answer this question by looking at the submission process itself. Firstly, the submission process to blog directories, RSS directories or search engine directories, varies from one to another. And with the large number of directories imagine how broad the variance is. With this alone, it would be impossible to create a program that allows you to submit a URL to all these directories given the variances in the submission process. Secondly, when you register to a certain directory, you are required to provide

1. Title for your Blog
2. Description for your Blog
3. Other directories might require you to provide Keywords or Keyphrases associated to your blog. (Software cannot do these.)

Lastly, most registrations to directories these days require you to verify your registration by entering a random variable to make sure that your registration is done by a human not a robot or software program. See? Even directories do not like automated registration. Certainly, all these reasons make it impossible for anyone to create a program that to accommodate such complex procedure.

Assuming without conceding that these programs work, it is not still advisable that you avail of it. Robots or software programs cannot think on their own so they cannot choose the best category for your blog, they cannot give a comprehensive description of your blog and lastly, these programs cannot help in the optimization of blog. It will infact do more harm to your blog than you think.

The Only Best Alternative

I'm sorry but the only best alternative is for you to register your blog manually. This means, you need to spend time to do it but only through this way will you be able to fully maximize the benefits of getting your blog registered to different directories. To make your registration process easier, here are the links to major directories. You just need to click on the link and register. Have fun.

Major Search Engine Directories

DMOZ
Google
Yahoo
AltaVista
AOL
Euroseek
Kanoodle
Teoma
Lycos

What-U-Seek
Moteurderecherche
Exactseek
Excite
Alexa
AllTheWeb
Inktomi
SearchIt
National Directory

Blog and RSS Directories

Search4RSS
DeskFeeds
Terrar
The Feed Spot
StepNewz
RSS Verzeichnis
4Guys from Rolla
DevASP
FuzzySoftware
ASP Index
SourceForge
Feed Directory
FeedBeagle
FeedPlex
Feeds4All
NewsFeedFinder
Plazoo
Newzfire
Feed24
Shas3
RSS Feeds Directory
FeedCat
FeedMiner
RSS
Clipping
Read A
Feed
Loomia
Feeds2Read
Feedzie
RSS
Portal
RSS Feed 4U
StepNewz
StepNewz
Thomas Korte
JordoMedia
RSS Mad
FeedBomb
nFeeds
Auto Feeds
News
Goblin
Wordum
FeedSee
Ez2News
Submit Feeds
Feedooyoo
Science
Port
FeedAge
GoldenFeed
RSSMicro
FeedDirectory
Octora RSS Feeds
RSS Locator
Syndic8
DayPop
Feedster
Rocket News
Technorati
Userland
Postami
Finance
Investing Feeds
Security Protection Feeds
Realty
Feeds
Medical
Feeds
Religious Podcasts
Sports Feeds
Political Feeds
Government Feeds
Educational Feeds
2RSS
NewsMob
RocketInfo
Edu RSS
Sourceforge.net
Complete RSS
Feeds.com.br
MoreOver
GeneCast
Memigo PubSub
BulkFeeds
Yenra
easyRSS
NewsXS
FeedFarm
FastBuzz
RSSFeeds
FeedFury
National Lib for Health
RSSMotron
FindRSS
FeedBase
RSSMotron
MoreNews.be
Day Time News
FeedGod
RSSBuffet
RSS
Feeds-Belgium
RSS Nachrichten-Germany
RSS Feeds-Israel
Spanish Feeds
Japanese
Feeds
SubmitEmNow
Blog
Digger
ReadABlog
Blogarama
BlogStreet
Globe of
Blogs
Kmax
Blog Links
BlogDex
BlogSearchEngine
BlogHop
BlogWise
EatonWeb
PopDex
Blizg
Blo.gs
BlogCensus
BlogTree
BlogStreet
BritBlog
BlogLines
Bloogz
Australian Blog Directory
BoingBoing
RootBlog
Weblog Directory
BlogoSphere EcoSystems
Blogz
BlogWatcher
BlogMatcher
BlogPulse
BlogCatalog
Blogdir Blogsrus
Blogs By City
FeedMap
BlogSearch
PubSub
BlogSweet
BlogFlux
Blogtastic
Blog Introduction
Finding
Blog
Bulletize
BlogTopSites
Blog Fuse
Blogion
AddUrlBlog
Blogbib
BOTW Blog
Blog Directory Submit
BlogTopSites
BlogBusiness
BlogSiteZone
Blog Universe
BlogTopList
BlogBurst

Tools for Bloggers

2007-08-25T14:16:00.001-07:00

Check Your Alexa Traffic Rank
View and compare Alexa Ranking graphs.

Check Your Website for Broken Links
Use this tool to check for broken links on a website.

Reciprocal Link Checker
Check your reciprocal links to see if link partners are still linking back to your site.

Website Speed Test
Find out how fast a specific website loads.

Google Banned Checker
Discover whether a website is banned on Google.

Index Checker
Check for the total number of pages of a specific website which are present on search engines.

Page Rank Checker
View Google PageRank on different Google servers.

Source Code Viewer
View the source code of a page.

Search Engine Position
Check your search engine positions on Google Search Engine.

Keyword Density Checker
This tool is useful for helping webmasters achieve optimum keyword distribution.

Search Listings Preview
Create a preview of how your website will appear on Google, MSN and Yahoo Search.

Domain Whois
Find all the information you need on any domain name. Check the DNS settings, Registrar details and much more.

Google PageRank Prediction
This predictor tool does what it says, it predicts your future Google PageRank.

Keyword Suggestion
Find related keywords matching your search.

Meta-tags Generator
Generate and configure your meta-tags.

Meta-tags Generator
Make a long web address short and easy to remember.

Link Price Calculator
Estimate how much to pay for a link.

Domain Availability Checker
Check for available domain names.

Get a loan by Text Message

2007-08-25T14:08:00.000-07:00

From: Springwise.com

"

Dutch consumers have a new way to take out loans: by SMS. Finnish Ferratum just launched its short-loan service in the Netherlands. Customers can borrow EUR 100, 200 or 300 for a term of 15 days, by texting Ferratum their name, date of birth, bank account and address. If they've pre-registered, the money is in their bank account within 10 minutes. First-time customers have to wait 24 hours. Speedy loans come at a cost: Ferratum charges a hefty 25% processing fee. Which means that consumers who borrow EUR 300 today, owe the company EUR 375 in 15 days time.

In Sweden, Estonia and Finland, where a handful of companies have started offering similar services over the past year, ombudsmen have been pushing for regulation. While critics claim that it's unwise to offer people such effortless methods of sinking (further) into debt, one could also argue that consumers should be able to choose whichever form of credit works best for them. Though the rates smell of shark, the concept is definitely quick and easy ;-) One to look into if you're in financial services or telecom. And for those of you seeking an antidote to fast credit: layaway is back."

10 Totally Stupid Online Business Ideas That Made Someone Rich

2007-08-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

From:

1. Million Dollar Homepage

1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.

2. SantaMail

Ok, how’s that for a brilliant idea. Get a postal address at North Pole, Alaska, pretend you are Santa Claus and charge parents 10 bucks for every letter you send to their kids? Well, Byron Reese sent over 200000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him a couple million dollars richer. Full Story

3. Doggles

Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me.

4. LaserMonks

LaserMonks.com is a for-profit subsidiary of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank, an eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your cartridges. Hallelujah! Their 2005 sales were $2.5 million! Praise the Lord. Full Story

5. AntennaBalls

You can’t sell antenna ball online. There is no way. And surely it wouldn’t make you rich. But this is exactly what Jason Wall did, and now he is now a millionaire. Full Story

6. FitDeck

Create a deck of cards featuring exercise routines, and sell it online for $18.95. Sounds like a disaster idea to me. But former Navy SEAL and fitness instructor Phil Black reported last year sales of $4.7 million. Surely beats what military pays.

7. PositivesDating.Com

How would you like to go on a date with an HIV positive person? Paul Graves and Brandon Koechlin thought that someone would, so they created a dating site for HIV positive folks last year. Projected 2006 sales are $110,000, and the two hope to have 50,000 members by their two-year mark.

8. Designer Diaper Bags

Christie Rein was tired of carrying diapers around in a freezer bag. The 34-year-old mother of three found herself constantly stuffing diapers for her infant son into freezer bags to keep them from getting scrunched up in her purse. Rein wanted something that was compact, sleek and stylish, so in November 2004, she sat down with her husband, Marcus, who helped her design a custom diaper bag that's big enough to hold a travel pack of wipes and two to four diapers. With more than $180,000 in sales for 2005, Christie's company, Diapees & Wipees, has bags in 22 different styles, available online and in 120 boutiques across the globe for $14.99.

9. PickyDomains

Hire another person to think of a cool domain name for you? No way people would pay for this. Actually, naming domain names for others turned out a thriving business, especially, when you make the entire process risk free. PickyDomains currently has a waiting list of people who want to PAY the service to come up with a snappy memorable domain name. PickyDomains is expected to hit six figures this year. Full Story

10. Lucky Wishbone Co.

Fake wishbones. Now, this stupid idea is just destined to flop. Who in the world needs FAKE PLASTIC wishbones? A lot of people, it turns out. Now producing 30,000 wishbones daily (they retail for 3 bucks a pop) Ken Ahroni, the company founder, expects 2006 sales to reach $1 million.

How To Make A Hundred Million Dollars Online

2007-08-25T14:03:00.000-07:00

From: http://uncommonbusiness.blogspot.com

"Finding a creative use of technology is what catapulted Blue Lithium Inc., an online advertising network in San Jose, California. Founded by Gurbaksh Chahal in 2005, the company provides specifically targeted marketing for clients, using data from 145 million consumers worldwide. "That online advertising model is focused on display media--banner ads, [etc.]. The model I wanted to recreate was using different ways to add data and using data to create sophistication around individual users," says Chahal. "So when you're serving an ad, it's actually relevant to that user--because you know they're male or female or you know something about their lifestyle through different data sources you can aggregate over time."

Chahal's expertise in providing targeted online ads has grown his startup at least 100 percent per year, pushing 2007 sales projections to nearly $100 million. Working with clients like Anheuser-Busch, Best Buy and Verizon, Chahal, 25, is looking to grow his company into international markets such as Germany, Italy and Spain in the near future. Staying ahead of this rapidly changing market is the order of the day. "You've got to make sure you continue to evolve with it and that you're evolving faster than the industry is evolving," says Chahal. "Every couple of years there's a bigger company out there. Before it was Yahoo!; now it's Google. There's a trend going on, and whoever is creating the trend ends up being the winner.""

How Serial Entrepreneurs do it

2007-08-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

From: The Starup Journal

Five years ago, Tom Scott and Tom First realized they would never have to work again. Friends from college, the pair had launched a juice brand called Nantucket Nectars from the back of their island boat and catapulted themselves -- the self-dubbed "juice guys" -- into the stuff of entrepreneurial legend as their beverage took off nationwide.

They sold a majority of their company to Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc., and when Cadbury Schweppes PLC later bought the entire business for an estimated $100 million in March of 2002, both men were set for retirement -- and they were only in their mid-30s.

But there was no retiring in their futures. Today Messrs. Scott and First are both deep into new ventures that, for now at least, appear headed for success. Mr. Scott leads Plum TV, a New York-based company that operates local television channels in historic, affluent markets such as Aspen, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, and has had notable investors including Starwood Capital Group CEO Barry Sternlicht, singer Jimmy Buffett and former Viacom CEO Tom Freston.

Mr. First is in the midst of a new start-up: O Beverages LLC, in Cambridge, Mass., which markets a line of naturally flavored waters already sold in nearly 20 states through Safeway, Balducci's and Bristol Farms, among other stores. In between Nantucket Nectars and their current ventures, the two men started a beverage-distribution-software company that was sold to a publicly traded technology company.

"I'm a crazy competitive person, so there's no way I'm stopping," Mr. First says. "I like being in the trenches."

Call them serial-preneurs. While some entrepreneurs struggle their whole lives to bring one idea or product to market, there's another breed: those who do it once, twice or three times more, disproving the notion of beginner's luck. In some cases, the brands and people are household names, such as Steve Jobs with Apple, Pixar and NeXT. But the ranks also are populated with lesser-known entrepreneurs who fly under the radar, hitting one start-up home run after the other.

"I really believe that some people are kind of entrepreneurial adrenaline freaks," says Wayne Stewart, a management professor at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C. "They really get their kicks by starting businesses."

In 2000, Mr. Stewart published a study with two other researchers looking for common traits among serial entrepreneurs -- which he defined as those who had owned and operated three or more businesses. Of the 664 entrepreneurs studied, only 12% fit the bill. But those who did scored higher in all three categories examined: They had a higher propensity for risk, innovation and achievement. They were less scared of failure. And they were more able to recover when they did fail.

Beyond that, many serial-preneurs bring tactical advantages from their first venture to apply the second and third time around. For instance, they recruit top talent from their original companies to subsequent ventures. They double-dip financially, getting money -- and connections -- from people who backed their earlier brainstorms. Several lean heavily on a trusted partner for financial, professional and emotional support in whatever endeavor they undertake.

More than anything, however, the greatest, and more crucial, challenge among repeat entrepreneurs is figuring out how to rekindle for future ventures the innocence, love and hunger that fueled their first enterprise. Despite hitting it big early with Nantucket Nectars, Messrs. First and Scott both struggled after the sale to find a business that inspired them as much as being the juice guys.

"A lot of the drive early on was the drive to not have to leave Nantucket, or write the resume, or go do anything else. We were hustlers," says Mr. First. Adds Mr. Scott: "What happened was that while approaching the things we love -- boats, water, weather -- we stumbled on juice. I've learned from this that it doesn't matter what I'm good at. It matters what I like."

What's the Motivation?

So why do some entrepreneurs who strike gold once continue to start over? A general contractor might launch a business because he has certain skills, and then stick with it until retirement. Or a banker will work her way up the corporate ladder, happy with the security of a paycheck and benefits, and retire once she has saved enough. By contrast, serial entrepreneurs' main job is the act of creation -- and thus they keep creating new businesses, often after they no longer need the paycheck.

"Most people can't understand why someone who made $10 million would do it again," says Seth Godin, who founded Yoyodyne, an interactive direct-marketing company bought by Yahoo in late 1998. He's now running a new online venture called Squidoo, a free tool that lets users build Web pages about any topic within a searchable community. "That's because most people don't like working, and they think it's irrational to keep working," he says. "But most entrepreneurs don't care about money; it's a tool."

For instance, Scott Jones was a multimillionaire by age 30, having co-founded the company Boston Technology, maker of a voice-mail system now used by many telephone companies world-wide. He retired, and learned how to fly planes and perform aerobatics, but was quickly bored. So he went back to work and has since co-founded Gracenote Inc., an Internet-accessible music database used by iTunes, as well as a robotic-lawn-mower company and a search engine that uses human guides in real time. Those years not creating, he says, were "the most unhappy years of my life."

Moreover, serial entrepreneurs harbor an unusual appetite for risk -- something they can inherit from their parents. Dan Bricklin, 56, has started four companies in his lifetime; his first Software Arts, was sold to Lotus Development Corp. in the mid-1980s. Mr. Bricklin's father was a small-business owner who ran a printing business, as did his grandfather.

Mr. Bricklin, who now runs Software Garden Inc. in Newton Highlands, Mass., says he feeds on the thrill of starting something new and untested. "It's like that sense of walking across a stream on the rocks -- sort of knowing where you're going, but sort of not." As for risk? "If you actually seen the ups and downs of a business, and your family isn't terrified, that makes it a lot easier to do yourself."

Likewise, Tim Miller caught the entrepreneurial bug at age 18 when he received about $500,000 after his father sold a company. Mr. Miller stashed that money away, planning to invest in his own company one day. Fifteen years later, he dipped into the fund to start a software firm called Avitek Inc. based on an idea his then-employer didn't want to explore. Mr. Miller recalls how family members fretted about the danger of going it alone, with his brother specifically questioning his judgment after he hired his fourth employee: How could he possibly put other people's livelihoods on the line?

"But it never truly occurred to me that I would potentially need to let any of them go at any point," Mr. Miller says, adding that he believes successful entrepreneurs "see opportunities where other see risk." He sold Avitek in 1999 for about $13.5 million, without layoffs, and is now running a venture called Rally Software Development Corp., based in Boulder, Colo.

The Value of Teamwork

Mr. Miller didn't succeed alone; he had a partner, Ryan Martens, who now works with him at Rally Software. Their compatibility is an asset whose value Mr. Miller finds hard to quantify. While Mr. Martens as the chief technology officer is deeply invested in software development, Mr. Miller is the business guy. "I think great leaders build teams," Mr. Miller says, "and those teams have some glue and they tend to stick together."

Whether by design or not, on second and third ventures, serials often surround themselves with familiar faces. Partly it's about familiarity and trust. Messrs. Scott and First both tapped ex-Nantucket Nectar employees for their newest ventures. They typically talk to each other several times a week, and Mr. Scott is an investor in O Beverages. "We've never doubted the other's total respect and having the other person's good interest at heart," Mr. First says.

Repeat relationships are also about expediency. Elizabeth Cogswell Baskin has run four companies, including two advertising agencies and a book-packaging operation. Now 46, she's the CEO of Tribe Inc., a $3 million Atlanta advertising agency that works with brands including Porsche, Home Depot and UPS, and peppered throughout Tribe's ranks are faces from her previous companies. "I think it is a huge shortcut to hire someone you already have a relationship with," Ms. Baskin says.

At age 77, Jack Goeken lays claim to having helped start a string of well-known enterprises: MCI, InFlight Phone, Airfone and several others. Now, he's deeply involved in a new start-up, Polybrite International Inc., a Naperville, Ill., company that produces a screw-in LED light bulb that will fit in normal lamps. His daughter Sandra, 49, has worked with him on every venture since MCI, and says one of her father's greatest strengths is "herding tigers" -- that is, finding entrepreneurial, and sometimes difficult to manage, individuals who can make a project happen, but then making sure they don't stick around too long.

"A team can come in and do a great start-up and make history, but the team that does that isn't the team to run it for 10 years," Ms. Goeken says. The key, she says, is to let those people know they'll be taken care of after a sale, so they don't hold a company's progress back worrying about a job. Bringing them on in the next venture is one inducement. Plus, she says, "they are a known entity and you take the risk out of the equation."

There are drawbacks to repeat employees. Mr. Godin, for one, believes the strategy can inhibit a fresh start. "One good thing is 'beginner's mind' -- people looking at something for the first time often have a fresh insight," he says. Plus, new businesses have different needs. At his first start-up, Yoyodyne, he says his team worked 21 hours a day in "emergency mode" -- a pattern he didn't want to repeat. "If I put the whole team together again, I don't know if we could have worked in anything but emergency mode."

More Money, Please

By contrast, hitting up the same investors, Mr. Godin believes, is almost always smart -- particularly if you made them money the first go-around. "They are doing everything on trust," he says.

David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue Airways Corp., says treating investors fairly and staying close to them between ventures is critical -- as is giving them an opportunity to invest in subsequent ventures. In fact, he says, all of JetBlue's investors, except George Soros, had been investors in his first airline, Morris Air. "I just went back to the investors of Morris Air and said, 'Do you want to do it again?' " He raised $90 million for JetBlue from his old investors and $40 million from Mr. Soros. Mr. Neeleman stepped down as JetBlue's CEO earlier this year after a series of high-profile flight cancellations, though he remains chairman.

What's more, serial entrepreneurs find many of the contacts, and information, they pick up with early ventures can pay off down the road. They court vendors, customers, trade groups, chambers of commerce -- even if they don't need them right away. While working in earlier ventures for her father, Ms. Goeken often spent weekends in foreign countries instead of going home, inviting business contacts to dinner. For many years, she mailed 1,400 Christmas cards all over the world, learned about different religions and picked the brains of partners' low-level employees about their country's customs.

"It may not be that important to you right now, but they might have something to teach you," she says. "I'd invest more than just getting the deal done. And time and time again, I went back to the same people in new ventures."

A Question of Desire

One of the hardest tasks serial entrepreneurs face is recapturing the drive and direction that fueled their first venture, without letting the first success overshadow or dictate what they do next. Sometimes, it's as simple as learning to let go. Says Ms. Goeken: "Walking out of Airfone was the saddest day of my life. When I finally pulled myself together, I never looked back. I don't miss a single company now."

Other times, it isn't so clear-cut. After Nantucket Nectars was sold, the founders started a beverage-distribution-software company because it seemed a natural evolution from being the juice guys. Trouble was, both men hated software, and left before the company was sold.

"I felt like I was turning into a sheep," says Mr. Scott. "I started wondering what I'd do about the rest of my life and was insecure, afraid and slightly depressed." Finally he pushed himself to understand what got him to Nantucket Nectars, and arrived at a rather amorphous answer: passion.

"We were passionate about ice, and pumping out sewage systems on boats; juice was just one of 50 things that we liked," Mr. Scott says. With Plum TV, he loves the civic nature of local TV -- even though it's about as far from juice as you can get. "I think the best entrepreneurs are like artists and painters," Mr. Scott says. "It's about creating. It's not about business."

Likewise, his partner, Mr. First, also fumbled at different enterprises, including starting a grocery store, until his wife said to him, "You're bored stiff, aren't you?" That set off a period of his own soul-searching -- eventually, leading him full circle. What he loved most, it turned out, was what he had already done: building a consumer-products company. So in early 2005, he launched O, and the first bottles hit the Boston market that spring.

Mr. First concedes that he sometimes feels the burden of re-entering a field he once dominated. Consumers don't pick up O and want to drink it just because Nantucket Nectars was a big hit; he doesn't have the "Tom and Tom" story -- he doesn't even have the other Tom.

"I constantly think about how I was the cool guy at Nantucket Nectars, a juice guy," Mr. First says. "I'm risking going back into the same industry and being a loser."

Still, Mr. First says, he's slowly learning to use the previous success to grease wheels where he can: Grocery chains, for instance, believe if he can do it once, he can do it again. The same is true with investors. "It gives me credibility," he says, "and the fight is too tough to leave a weapon in the bag."

Make money from your blog in 24 hours or less

2007-08-25T13:58:00.000-07:00

from: Aojon.Com

"So word has it that I haven’t made many good posts lately that help people make cash. Well, I agree, so here’s how you can make some bank quickly and easily without breaking the bank too. Let’s take a quick look at Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing and see how underrated it is and how you can seriously make some cash without getting too wrapped up and hung up on the usual things that stop you from moving forward.

1- Create a site. If you don’t know how to, well, get someone to do it for you. It’s not that hard, hell, even I can do it and I am a retard when it comes to tech/design stuff. So buy a domain, get a cheap hosting account for it, toss up a WordPress blog and theme (takes the hassle out of creating a site), and you’re in business.

2- Depending on what your domain theme is, if it has one, make the site around an affiliate marketing offer. It can be a product, a service, doesn’t really matter which. Just pick something! There are no bad ideas or good ideas, everything can work in it’s own right if done correctly. If you are being a lazy bastard and need me to pick one for you, then choose a product that is cheap for the end user and serves some type of beneficial purpose. Ad networks have a billion offers, I’m sure you can find one. But try and keep out of finance/mortgage and ringtones for now, because those take lots of research, time and cash.

3- Great, you have your product picked out, now make a blog post about it. If you don’t know all that much about it, do some quick research on Wikipedia or Google. It’s also a good idea to put a banner up or a full page ad for it if you aren’t going to write a blog post about it. Either way, make sure the theme of the blog is about the product you are promoting. Maybe make the color scheme the same as the page where the user will buy something or fill out the lead.

4- So let’s assume you have your domain, host, blog with the offer all setup. Alright, so now comes traffic, the fun part! Let’s use Google Adwords and MSN AdCenter for it. Take $100 and deposit it into each of the accounts. You probably won’t use all of it, but it’s good to have it in there. With Adsense we can begin right away, but with MSN you may have to wait 24 hours or so until their slow asses get to approving the account. With both though, there are tons of free cash coupons and promo codes out there, and some on WickedFire.com that you can use and get some free cash to use.

5- Time for some keyword research. Before you start to use every keyword tool under the sun, let’s do a bit of manual work. First go and look at the advertiser’s page and pull keywords off there by hand. We want to focus on something called LONG TAIL KEYWORDS. We don’t want the one or two word keywords because they are very general, expensive, and usually being looked at for research purposes and don’t have many “buy now” people using them. A long tail keyword are those 3, 4, 5+ word keywords that really target a product. So for example, a good longtail mortgage refinance keyword I would use is “refinance los angeles california” or “bad credit refinance new york” INSTEAD of “refinance new york” or “refinance la”. You can even compare the prices, and you’ll see the longer ones may not get much traffic on it, but they are so cheap compared to the other more general ones.

6- So you have some general and longtail keywords. Fantastic. Now some people use misspelling tools and whatnot, which is a good idea, so go over to SEOBook.com into the tools section and use Aaron Wall’s misspelling tool. But don’t do that just yet, because that’s the last step. What you should do first is get a nice long list of longtail keywords of what you think people are using when they are in “buying mode” when searching on the engines for your product. So if the product is some kind of insole for a shoe, your keywords would be: buy shoe insole, cheap insole for shoes, doctor recommended shoe insole. Those are pretty good, and sure, they are nowhere near as robust as something like “shoe insole” or “shoe pad” but they are more likely to be in buying mode than researching mode. So your job, for the next 1-3 hours is to gather up as many of these keywords as possible. If you want to use keyword tools to do it for you, by all means, knock yourself out, but if this is your first time doing something like this, and you want to learn how to do it right, do it by hand, the old fashioned way, just until you get the swing of things. When you’re done collecting the keywords, run it through the misspelling tool, and save the end result. Make sure to also group the keywords into 5-15 keywords per group for Adwords and AdCenter. You’ll thank me later.

7- We have our keywords, the site, the domain, the product. Wonderful, now on to getting some traffic finally! Take those groups of keywords and make one primary campaign for them in AdWords and the sub-campaigns for them based on which keyword theme they are. You don’t want to put too many keywords into one group because you want to keep your ads as relevant as possible for that group of keywords that it represents. So go ahead and make your ads. I typically write out 3-4 ads in the beggining, but sometimes as little as 2. It really depends on how confident you are of the keywords. Make sure to include the keyword, or the main idea of the base keywords (meaning, if the keywords all revolve around “back pain” make sure “back pain” is in the ads). Don’t be boring with the ad copy either, try and liven it up to get the attention of the searcher that will make them want to not only click on your ad, but also buy or fill out a lead for your product. Use your domain and page/site for this. Make sure all the traffic goes to your killler blog page.

8- Once you’re done with all of the above do something very important now.. Change the keywords so they are all EXACT and PHRASE matches. You can even go as far as to create seperate ad groups if you really want to, but sometimes that’s just overkill and may also screw up your other campaigns for good keywords. The reason you don’t want to go with broad in the beginning is because you’re on a mission now. That mission is not to make money, but to get your CTR up to a nice level. You’re going to want to be doing this for a good day or so. Don’t worry, you won’t lose much money, and afterall, a lot of those clicks aren’t just going to go nowhere, they’ll be going to your blog/promo page. You still have a great chance that they will also result in a sale/lead. So no need to fret about it.

9- Wow step 9 already, look how quickly we flew through this tutorial. Granted there are a lot of details being left out, but you will learn them on your own and pick them up pretty quickly too. You have to admit, this is a hell of a lot easier than you thought it would be right? So the reason I want you to use a blog or something with content on it and not just a redirect or linking directly to the affiliate code is because Google and MSN have this algorithm called QS aka Quality Score. They say, that if a site looks like it’s not selling something exclusively, meaning, that the site’s sole purpose is to spread information rather than sales then it should not be paying as much as a commercial site that has a huge budget. Also these types of results (your site) are relevant for users and give them what they are looking for, instead of a sales page and a “buy this thing now or you will die!” approach. We want the users to buy or fill out leads, but we don’t want to give them the impression that it’s ALL we want, so maybe tack on a newsletter signup link. You can use Aweber, they are cheap and good. Also tack on a few information links on the blogroll or in the posts. To really beef up your QS, send some inbound links from other blogs, directories, sites, forums, wherever really. Just pretend you are SEO’ing it as well as using it for a PPC campaign. Within 2 weeks or less your QS should jump, your CTR should jump, and best of all, your PPC bid price will drop! In the wise words of Borat.. Wowaweewa!

10- This is not over. Just because your ROI is 2:1-3:1 or better doesn’t mean you are leaving this alone and moving onto the next thing. Your ass needs to go over everything, step by step. Keep a list. What went wrong and why? What changes did you make to it, and what type of effect did it have on the sale/lead/traffic? Ask yourselves as many questions as possible. If you can’t answer it yourself, go to the forums and ask someone there. There is an answers to almost any PPC and affiliate marketing related question on WickedFire.com somewhere, and if we don’t have it, another forum will, or ASK about it, because as great as we may seem to think we are, we can’t read your mind and see what’s going wrong. Be as detailed as possible too!

So there you have it. A blog post of value, quality and meaning. Will it make you millions? I doubt it. But be realistic, you need to try things out and learn them for yourself before you can pass judgement on it or decide it’s “too hard”, because this is not hard at all. This is easy shit compared to any job offline that you may have had to do for a paycheck. So quit sitting on your ass and reading this, and go out and do something about it! The rest is up to you boys and girls, so go make me proud and try it!"