Real Life Story ***

Intresting

2009-12-14T10:22:00.000-08:00

When a people have desired to be a webmaster, he or she must be looking for any information, which explains about how to make a good website and how to get many costumers from there. Absolutely, it is not as easy as if you are making a pancakeJ. A good website must be has many interesting information articles so that can make any people who has visited the website decide to buy some products or some services which provided by the website.

However, the main problem is; Where can we get all information about how to writing a good article in a website? On the other words, how can we get the writing tips?

Well, actually if you search it in the internet seriously you will get many writing tips at here. There are many sites in the internet that gives you some writing tips freely. You just need to visit their site and read or download the file. Some writing tips usually explain you how to make a good article in step by step. You just have to understand and practice the tips to make a good article for your website. If you have understood the tips, then try to make one or more articles for your website and then see how the visitors’ reaction after read them.

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Vital Marketing Goes Back to School

2008-07-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

After years of promoting brands like Remy Martin and Nintendo, Vital Marketing is on the other side of the press release: trying to promote its own product line of new back-to-school supplies.

The multicultural experiential firm is putting its Street Science line of binders and notebooks in K-Mart and on Amazon.com in time for the start of the academic year.

"Ad agencies have been staking a deeper position in their client's business in terms of helping with product development," said Joseph Anthony, CEO and founder of Vital Marketing, New York. "Now they are taking it a step further and creating their own products and distributing them through connections they have forged over the years."

A number of other small agencies have developed their own product lines in recent years. Josh Taekman, president of Buzztone, Los Angeles, joined with New York City restaurateur John McDonald to create eBoost, an immunity and energy booster. Malbon Brothers Farms, New York, has Frank 151, a culture magazine distributed in 16 countries. And Cornerstone, New York, has the music and lifestyle magazine Fader.

Anthony said the school supply allows him to better relate to clients who are trying to sell products. It also gives the agency president, who is himself a product of public schools, a chance to give back to the education system. Five percent of all profits from the Street Science school line will go to literacy and other educational programs.

So what happens if Staples comes knocking and a conflict of interest occurs? "I would have to decide which had the bigger upside," Anthony said. "At the same time, creating a product line could have a halo effect on my overall business." Vital Marketing pulled in $20 million in revenue last year, per the company.

Google Adsense - How To Make A Real Income From Google Adsense Effortlessly

2008-07-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

Google AdSense business can be an excellent source to supplement your income or profits. But, many people make the mistake of using it as their main source of income. The problem here is that Google is pretty harsh on people who try to cheat and will shut out your ads. At times, this can happen even without your knowledge.

Choosing your pick

Monetizing your website need not depend entirely on Google AdSense business. When you provide information value to your content, you can also provide related product reviews or articles on that topic. If these do not engage the visitor, perhaps he will click your AdSense ad.

Affiliate programs

You should do a fair bit of homework before monetizing the topics with AdSense. Searches will reveal niche areas. But, are all the niche areas identified going to work for you and bring in Google AdSense profits or income? Not always, and therefore, identify those niches where advertisers are willing to spend decent sums of money. Don’t get carried away by commission percentages alone. $10×2%x100 = $20, whereas $10×15%x7 =$10.5.

Where do you find the high paying topics?

Well, open a Google AdSense Business account and build a new campaign. Use the estimate traffic button to see what your keywords are worth. Google gives you the cost per click for each keyword. Look for the most expensive keywords in the list and then optimize your own pages for that keyword. Now look at the flow of income and profits from Google AdSense business.

Search Engine Optimization Secrets Of A #1 Google Ranking

2008-07-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t matter how great your product is, what a bargain your price is, or how beautiful your website is - Without traffic none of that matters.

So at its most basic, the biggest determinant of your web businesses success is “getting eyeballs looking at your webpages.”

When looking at where the traffic comes from, it begins with others linking (or pointing the way) to your site. Since most people automatically turn to the search engines when looking for something online, that naturally tells me that the most important links that you can easily get are probably from the search engines.

Since Google is currently the search engine getting the most use online, and therefore the one that generates the most traffic, that also means that you need to focus on getting a front page, or ideally a number 1 listing, at Google.

However, your search engine optimization efforts should involve structuring your site, and your other search engine magnets, so that it bring in BUYERS from Google.

At its most basic, and simplest, getting a number 1 ranking at Google that leads to an endless stream of sales boils down to three parts. They are:

1) Targeting The Correct Keywords

2) Optimizing A Page For Those Keywords

3) Getting Links From Sites That Google Loves

Let’s look at each of these.

First, you absolutely have to target the correct keyword. Your webpages and everything that you do needs to incorporate the keywords that your buying customers are actually typing into the search engines.

You don’t want to target the phrase digital camera, or printer cartridge. Instead you want to target a specific model of digital camera or printer cartridge, and you may even want to target people in a specific location looking for a specific model of printer cartridge.

That kind of targeting means that the people who find you are searching for something very specific, and when they find you by typing in that very specific search term, they click through and buy.

Next, you need to optimize your webpages for those keyword phrases. That generally means that you need the target keyword phrases sprinkled throughout your webpages. It also means that you want to use your target keyword phrases in your title and description “metatags.” You also want to include your keyword phrases in anchor text on your webpages (the blue underlined text in hyperlinks).

You basically want to include your keyword phrases in all of the parts of your webpages that tells the search engines what your webpage is about. This includes places such as italicized or bolded text, your menu items, and even alt image tags.

Finally, you need to get sites that Google thinks are important to link to you. Ideally, these sites include your keyword phrases in the anchor text when they link to you.

Many who study search engine optimization full-time are convinced that the external links pointing to your website are THE part that makes the biggest difference in most cases.

Having an authority site link to you is like having a respected authority in your community give you an endorsement. They are telling the search engines, and the rest of the world, that they recommend you. By using your keywords in the anchor text, authority sites are also telling Google (and other less important search engines) that that is what they consider your site to be about.

This factor is so powerful that I have personally often gotten a number 1 position on Google for my most important keywords by just tapping into one free website optimization tool… one authority site! In fact, I recently did an interview with David Preston, an expert at teaching offline businesses to tap into the web in ways that most of their competitors never even dreamed of. In the interview with David, we discussed in-depth, how I easily get free front-page listings at Google in a day, and how I often get #1 listing for my ideal keywords in just hours.

I mention David and that interview because he taught me another CRITICAL part of effective search engine optimization. He taught

me how to focus my efforts on the buyers with lots of money to spend… customers who have already budgeted that money for what I have to offer.

So there you have my very simple three-part search engine optimization formula for getting a free number one ranking in Google in as little as a few hours. That fourth part, focusing on the buyers actively looking to spend money is a bonus

How To Find Your Ad In The Search Engines

2008-07-23T15:34:00.000-07:00

You’ve set up your ad campaign and now you want to see your ad live. What do you do?

Well, not to be snide, but you do the obvious. Perform a search.

Go down your list of keywords. Start with the keywords that have the highest bids as those are likely to be displayed first. Search for them one by one and see if your ad pops up on the SERPs when you enter those keywords. Go beyond page 1 because your ad may not always appear on the first page. Scroll down several pages to see if you can find your pay per click AD.

After looking through your most expensive keywords, try searching for the most relevant keywords. Those are the keywords that are most often used on your landing page. Pick the top 5. Search for them as well.

After that, go through the rest of the list.

Be sure to conduct a search at different times of the day. Because the search engines spread your ads out across the day so as not to expend your daily budget before noon, you may not see it at certain times. If you chose to show your ads only at a certain time of day then perform a search during those times. Otherwise, try it several times throughout the day to see when your ads may be appearing in the SERPs.

Pay-per-click Advertising: The Top 100 Keyword Phrases How about $51 per click?

2008-07-23T15:25:00.000-07:00

Last time I checked, Spyfu.com is reporting that someone is bidding $51.66 per click for phrase “conference calling companies.” Are you bidding on words like this, which is one of the most expensive keyword phrases? Let’s take a look at the most expensive pay-per-click keywords and what you can do to reduce your overall PPC costs.

If you are in a niche that includes “conference calling,” lawyers, insurance, loans, or mortgages, there is a good chance that the keyword prices (what companies are willing to pay per click, what they’re bidding per click and what they’re paying per click) gets pretty expensive. At last check, the “cheapest” of the top 100 most expensive phrases is $43.75 per click. And at those costs, it pays to make sure that you are providing your users the optimal web experience when they come to your web site via those expensive keywords.

Let’s take a look at some of the top 100 most expensive keyword phrases:
Expensive keyword phrases; cost per click
conference calling companies $51.66
purchase structured settlements $51.48
home owner secured loan $50.36
mesothelioma patient $50.23
austin texas dwi lawyer $50.03
phoenix dui lawyers $50.01
insurance auto $50.00
secured loans $50.00
phoenix dui attorney $50.00
car free insurance online quote $49.96

Even if you are not paying $50 a click for a visitor to your website, you need to realize that you are charged for every click. So it pays to make sure that you provide the optimal experience but also convert as many of those visitors as possible. There are several things you can do right now to make every click count.

First, take a look at your web analytics. Make sure that you have the proper conversion tracking in place so that you know exactly which phrases are converting into a lead, a sale, or however else you track a conversion. For example, when someone clicks on your pay-per-click ad, what do you expect the visitor to do? Do you want them to look at your website, add something their shopping cart and purchase something? If that is the case, then perhaps you would set up your web analytics goals so you can track which keywords are driving the most sales. If you have this list, then you can compare that list with the keywords you are bidding on and consider dropping the bids on keyword phrases that bring visitors but do not bring in sales. If your goal is to have a visitor fill out a lead form then that also could be a goal, then put a price on each lead (how much is each lead worth to you?) and start tracking the keywords that are bringing in leads.

An audit of your web analytics should reveal the keyword phrases that are most valuable to you, the phrases that are bringing in conversions. Once you are able to determine this, compare the list with the bid prices and compare that list with your list of negative keywords. Consider adding keywords to your negative keyword list if they do not convert into sales or leads for you.

Consider taking your keyword list of your best performing keywords and testing them on a 2nd tier pay-per-click search engine. (See related article, “2nd Tier Search Engines – Are They Worth It?” Determine which keywords are performing (bringing in sales or leads) and which keywords are not performing. After all, some keywords do better on Yahoo! or Google and some perform better on the 2nd tier search engines. You must test each one by setting up the proper analytics.

It’s all about the bottom line. If you have a good handle on your web analytics and which keywords are converting, then raising your bid prices (even on the 2nd tier search engines) on the keywords that are converting should not be a tough task. Take a look at your “average sale” or the value you have put on each sales lead. How many of those pay-per-click visitors convert into a sale or a lead? How many “clicks” does it take to make a sale or to get a lead? If the numbers work out, then consider raising your bid prices. You just might find yourself bidding on one of the top 100 most expensive keyword phrases.

iPhone 3G Launch Date Confirmed

2008-05-25T04:15:00.000-07:00

We all suspected it, but now it is confirmed: someone very, very close to the 3G iPhone launch has told me that Apple will announce their new model at the WWDC Keynote on June 9th. The second-generation iPhone will be available worldwide right after the launch, and not at year's end, as previously thought. The new model will also herald new sales policies in some countries.

In Spain, for example, the 3G iPhone will be available for sale at the June 18th grand opening of Telefonica's megastore—an Apple Store-like shop located in the company's historical building in Madrid's Gran Vía— with nationwide availability the next day or after a few hours. The other European countries with iPhone availability will have similar launch schedules.

According to another source involved in the launch, the 3G iPhone will no longer be available at a fixed price point—at least in some countries, and its launch will also bring new sales policies, although these have not been completely specified yet.

The move is a logical step, since the iPhone has clearly solidified its position as the cellphone to beat during the last 12 months, and companies in the cutthroat European cellphone market need to use it as an incentive to capture clients aggressively.

This most probably means the new 3G iPhone will be integrated in the usual marketing systems of carriers, with point-based trade-ups, discounts for carrier switchers and other service-based subvention packages.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull E! Reviews

2008-05-25T04:02:00.001-07:00

Review in a Hurry: Oh, like you care. They had you with the opening strains of “Da-da-da-DAH…” Fortunately, a smart script and great set pieces make this tale of Soviet spies, weird artifacts and a lost city a worthy capstone to the series.

The Bigger Picture: It’s been about twenty years since The Last Crusade, on-screen and off, and Dr. Henry Jones Jr.he’s pretty much dropped the nicknameis still searching for ancient mysteries and still fighting bad guys. Only now, he’s traded Nazi spies for Russians, led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), who wants him to crack the secret of a crystal skull that promises vast power.

Rather than pretend he hasn’t aged a day, the script takes into account Indy’s advancing years. He’s not as quick with a whip as he used to be, and the world has changed, too. Dr. Jones finds himself under suspicion by the FBI as a Commie, despite having saved the world for democracy several times, and his old allies are dead or gone.

Fortunately, he gets a new sidekick, a motorcycle punk named Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) to help pick up the slack. Mutt’s mom used to date Indy, and she’s gone missing while on the trail ofyou guessed itthe same crystal skull.

He might be old, but once he gets out the leather jacket and the fedora, Indy proves he’s still the best there is at dodging bullets, death traps and flesh-devouring ants.

Do Online Reputation Management Services Work?

2008-05-25T03:55:00.000-07:00

Google the name of your company right now. See anything you don't like? If you do, at least a dozen services promise they can make it disappear.

An industry of online fixers is sprouting to defend clients against damaging information on the Web. With potential customers increasingly heading online to research products and services, bad reviews or complaints that turn up in a search can mean lost business. Reputation management services promise to highlight positive pages and bury offending sites deep in search results.

Most reputation services work by tracking what's written about a client on the Web, then doing search engine optimization, promoting positive pages, and creating other sites that will push damaging references off the first pages of search results. The services are pitched as another tool companies can use in their PR and marketing efforts.

It's still hard to say how companies are using reputation management services, but industry players say clients fall into two camps. Some want to understand and respond to customer complaints; others often just want negative posts to go away. "The majority of inquiries that I get are from people who are looking to do a cover-up," says Andy Beal, a marketing consultant and co-author of Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online. "They're not necessarily interested in trying to fix the problem. They just want to make sure that other people can't find it."
Shouting Voices

Online reputation management evolved in the past two or three years in response to the explosion of social media that amplified the voices of individual Internet users. There are no data on how big the market is. "It's kind of a fast-emerging field as more and more companies become aware of the need to have some sort of tracking," says Michael Greene, an analyst at JupiterResearch who authored a report in January about responding to negative buzz online.

Reputation management companies describe typical small-business clients such as a pet store targeted by animal rights activists or a stockbroker linked to decades-old Securities & Exchange Commission violations. (Two different firms independently volunteered both as examples.) It's almost impossible to get such pages taken down, but placing enough positive references above to push them off the first page or two of Google results is where reputation management comes in.

But altering search results isn't cheap. Several companies said the typical cost for a small business client starts at $1,000 a month. More extensive services marketed to large corporations run into the tens of thousands of dollars. ReputationDefender, a two-year-old Menlo Park (Calif.) company that mainly markets to individuals, plans to introduce a service for companies that would cost a one-time fee of a few hundred dollars, according to founder Michael Fertik.

Fertik and others are establishing a trade group, the Online Reputation Management Assn., to certify members and promote best practices, because no clear standards exist for what is and is not acceptable. "We feel that a lot of ethical shadiness is happening in this business," Fertik says. Most companies set their own boundaries about what's appropriate: Beal says he won't take clients who appear to be a habitual offenders, and Fertik says he won't lie for clients or impersonate customers.
Hired Guns?

But there's little agreement on where the line is drawn. For example, one company, Internet Reputation Management, founded last year by three partners in the New York area, recruits bloggers to write about clients on third-party sites, without necessarily disclosing that they're paid, according to partner Carl Sgro.

"We ask bloggers to be truthful," Sgro says. "We don't want anything to be overembellished." Chris Martin, founder of two-year-old ReputationHawk in Baton Rouge, La., says his company runs blogs that promote his clients, but he doesn't pay bloggers to post on outside sites. Other companies warn against surreptitiously promoting clients on blogs, not least because if it comes to light, the damage is hard to control.

Trying to spin search results is a tough game. For evidence, simply Google ReputationDefender. A recent search turned up in the fourth result a critical post from the Consumerist blog blasting the company for attempting to have a post removed. (Fertik says that taking down negative content, a service ReputationDefender markets to individuals, is not available for businesses.) Other bad press is not hard to find.

Google, for its part, says there is nothing inherently wrong with reputation services, but "if you use spammy and manipulative techniques to get this positive content to rank highly, we may take action on it," a spokeswoman writes in an e-mail. (With two-thirds of U.S. search volume in April, according to Hitwise, Google is clearly reputation companies' biggest target.) The company refers to its Webmaster Guidelines, for violations that can get sites banished, such as using hidden links or creating "cookie-cutter" affiliate pages just to boost page rank.

What should small-business owners make of all this? Beal says tinkering with what comes up when customers search a company's name may be necessary, but it's rarely sufficient to repair a reputation. "You have to take partial ownership in fixing your online reputation," he says. "It's not something that you can simply just provide a credit card number to a company and they can take care of it." While outside firms can help businesses influence results on Google, only the company itself can repair real damage to its reputation.

[Via - BusinessWeek.Com]

An E-Commerce Empire, From Porn to Puppies

2008-05-25T03:51:00.000-07:00

TRIBUTES on the Web site of Richard J. Gordon‘s company strike all of the uplifting chords one would expect of a digital maverick. He is described as a “trailblazing businessman” who is “operating in the front ranks of those transforming the Internet into the global marketplace of the future.”

There is an echo of truth in all of this. Though most Internet buffs have probably never heard of him , Mr. Gordon, 62, played a significant role in the birth of electronic commerce. While Amazon.com and eBay were still fledgling enterprises, the companies that Mr. Gordon founded in the early 1990s were already laying the groundwork for electronic transactions conducted with credit cards — a development that opened the doors to the first generation of e-commerce start-ups.

And if the Internet is for porn, as the hit Broadway show “Avenue Q” asserts, perhaps it was only natural that many of Mr. Gordon’s early clients were purveyors of X-rated entertainment.

While riches were being minted and squandered in the dot-com ’90s, Mr. Gordon made a fortune by taking a commission for processing sales on a range of sites from small, mainstream retailers to others like ClubLove, which published the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape. Today, his payment processing company continues to have roots in the world of sexual entertainment. One of the several companies he owns or operates, Processing Solutions, facilitates credit card transactions for the Web sites of DTI, or Dial Talk International, according to current and former employees familiar with the arrangements.

DTI is based on the Caribbean island of Curaçao and runs, from Los Angeles, a vast and profitable network of explicit Web sites for the Japanese market.

As the Web has evolved since the early days of e-commerce, so has Mr. Gordon. Although he fashioned his early career around credit card transactions and helping Internet pornographers, he has more recently adopted an ecumenical approach to business as the shepherd for an altogether different endeavor: a Christian charity.

Until last week, Bold New World, his Los Angeles-based Web design firm, had a lucrative contract to design sites for the American Bible Society — the 192-year-old philanthropy based in Manhattan whose mission is to make a Bible available to every person in the world.

Bold New World has also created the Web site for a charity called SPCA International, which fights animal abuse; it helps members of the armed forces bring dogs home from Iraq. That charity has been stirring controversy in the animal-rights world because it owns no animal shelter and is unaffiliated with older and more established societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals.

Although Mr. Gordon has yoked together disparate endeavors that support pornography, the Bible, and prevention of animal abuse — all by marrying the universal purchasing power of credit cards to the respectability conveyed by slick Web sites — those familiar with his operations say his relationship with DTI remains the nexus of his enterprise.

There are no official numbers on the pornography industry. But those who have studied its operations view DTI as a pivotal player in the world of pornography. “DTI appears to rank in the top 1 percent of adult entertainment companies in the world,” said M. J. McMahon, publisher of AVN Online, an Internet news site covering the industry.

Mr. Gordon’s lawyer, Miles Woodlief, said that “neither Mr. Gordon nor his companies have involvement in” the pornography business. For his part, Mr. Gordon, in a brief e-mail message, describes his career in more elevated terms.

“I have been an inventor, creative genius and pioneer,” he asserted in a statement sent by a spokesman. “I have worked with thousands of people around the world in the last 30 years, countless of whom, including legislators, governors, United States presidents, C.E.O.’s and self-made billionaires, all of whom I personally made aware of earlier mistakes, and would be happy to sing my praises.”

MORE than a dozen current and former employees and business partners of Mr. Gordon say that whatever operations his business now encompasses, processing transactions for pornography sites has long been a central component. Some of them requested anonymity, worried that Mr. Gordon might sue them for speaking publicly about his operations.

These people characterized DTI, which is owned and operated by Wataru Takahashi, a Japanese billionaire who has worked with Mr. Gordon on various enterprises for at least a decade, as one of the most lucrative and enduring clients for Mr. Gordon’s credit card processing business.

DTI is an amalgam of dozens of Web sites, offering paying customers everything from live video sessions with pornographic performers to sexually explicit manga cartoons. The sites bring in revenue of about $15 million a month, according to several current and former DTI employees who have knowledge of its finances. DTI produces the content for many of these sites in Los Angeles, then pipes the material to computer screens in Japan, which has strict laws on explicit performances.

Central to the sales and billing portion of DTI’s business are services provided by Mr. Gordon’s company.

“Gordon processes credit cards for every single Web site owned by Mr. Takahashi,” said Alex Becker, a contractor who was a senior executive of Stickam, a social network based in Los Angeles. “Mr. Takahashi depends on Richard, and they always work together.”

Stickam, a live video chat Web site aimed at teenagers, is financed and operated by DTI, according to Mr. Becker. Scott Flacks, a former senior executive of Stickam who left the company this spring, said that Mr. Gordon and Mr. Takahashi appeared to have a close relationship.

“There’s a loyalty between the two that transcends business,” he said.

One other employee who worked directly for DTI for several years said that Mr. Gordon had helped to set up accounts for DTI with at least two banks in America and one in Germany. The employee says that Mr. Gordon’s company receives regular monthly payments from DTI for facilitating these relationships. He requested anonymity because he signed a confidentiality agreement with DTI.

“Richard is the smoother,” this person said. “He is the relationship between the banks and Takahashi for sure, although you are not going to find it anywhere on paper.”

Mr. Takahashi and Mr. Gordon also appear to help one another hire employees and court business and political contacts. In February 2007, Mr. Takahashi held a lavish weekend birthday party for his wife on Grand Cayman, where he spends part of each year in a condominium at the Ritz-Carlton hotel.

According to accounts from four people who were there, about 100 guests, including Mr. Gordon and several of his colleagues, were flown in from all over the world in private jets. Among the attendees was a representative of a major casino company in Las Vegas — Mr. Takahashi is an avid gambler and a frequent visitor to the city — and Stanton D. Anderson, a longtime Republican activist and a consultant to the American Bible Society. Mr. Anderson did not respond to interview requests.

Guests were treated to a Caribbean cruise and a resplendent dinner on the beach with an orchestra and electric fans that blew multihued sheets into the air. As guests feasted on grilled lobster tail and filet mignon, Mr. Takahashi and the casino representative lavished expensive gifts, like a Tiffany diamond tennis bracelet, on Mr. Takahashi’s wife.

IN 1979, six years after being honorably discharged from the Navy, Mr. Gordon found himself on the bad end of a bust. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested him after finding him hiding in a closet of a friend’s apartment in Washington, D.C. On a living room table were four round-trip Concorde tickets to Paris.

According to a 1981 review of the case by a federal appeals court, New York State authorities had been investigating accusations that Mr. Gordon, who then lived outside Albany and ran insurance and financial planning companies, had dipped into customer funds. When he learned of the investigation, according to the court documents, Mr. Gordon closed his businesses and fled Albany, planning to go to Europe.

He was ultimately convicted in 1980 of mail fraud, interstate transportation of a stolen check and making a false statement to a bank. He served more than two years of a seven-year sentence in federal prison in Danbury, Conn., and Lompoc, Calif.

“Nearly 30 years ago, as a zealous, eager young entrepreneur, I made a mistake. I was convicted and served a sentence,” Mr. Gordon says of this period in his life. “I have diligently and honorably been an entrepreneur, inventor and businessman for almost three decades. I created jobs and career opportunities for thousands of people.”

After moving to Los Angeles in 1983, he worked as a business consultant throughout the ’80s, according to reports in Los Angeles business publications at the time. Mr. Gordon then engineered yet another act in his business career: facilitating credit card transactions over the phone.

According to reports in trade journals at the time, he appears to have started by processing credit cards for 1-900 and other telephone services, mail orders and television infomercials. He also became among the first to process transactions on the Web.

At the time, the credit card industry was aghast at Web transactions since they were not face-to-face dealings. In addition, many of the early Web commerce operators were so-called high-risk merchants, like pornographers and online gambling companies. Banks charge higher rates for these transactions because people tend to contest those items on their bill, perhaps to mollify an angry spouse.

While other payment processors avoided the stigma and high rates, Mr. Gordon saw opportunity. His companies in the ’90s, including Electronic Card Systems, devised ways to mitigate the risk. One method involved creating databases of unreliable customers and then refusing troublesome users when they returned to the Web to make purchases.

Mr. Gordon “was a pioneer,” said Jeffrey D. De Petro, who worked as a risk manager for Electronic Card Systems from 1995 to 1998. “We came up with different ways to monitor e-commerce transactions, and I think it defined the pros and cons of the industry.”

Mr. De Petro and five other former employees from this time say that CryptoLogic, an early Canadian online gambling network, was one large client. They also say that Mr. Gordon processed credit card transactions for ClubLove and other sites owned by the Internet Entertainment Group, now defunct, which offered pornographic photographs and videos for a monthly membership fee.

“He was the house for Internet porn in the early days,” said Steven Peisner, a veteran of the card processing industry who worked for Electronic Card Systems in 1997. “At that time, if you had anything to do with Internet porn, you called Electronic Card Systems.”

Mr. Gordon’s employees from the time remember extravagantly decorated offices on the fifth, sixth and seventh floors of the Luckman Building on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. There was fine art on the walls and a constant supply of fresh flowers in the lobby. Mr. Gordon held sumptuous parties for employees at his home in the Hollywood Hills and drove a Bentley.

He appears to have created and run many companies in the ’90s, though they were all related and shared office space, according to Mr. Peisner and other former employees. In addition to Electronic Card Systems and a related entity, Electronic Authorization Systems, Mr. Gordon was involved with magazine publishing, long-distance telephone service and an interior decorating company, among other pursuits.

In 1999, to take advantage of the dot-com gold rush, Mr. Gordon combined many of these companies into a single entity, CreditCards.com, according to a company press release at the time. But the company was having financial problems. Former employees say they remember paychecks occasionally bouncing and leased furniture being repossessed.

According to documents filed with the bankruptcy appellate panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Mr. Gordon brought in new partners from Nashville in 1999 and borrowed several million dollars from them, using his stock as collateral.

The documents, filed as part of litigation relating to business disputes at the company, say that when Mr. Gordon could not pay his partners back, they removed him. The company is now called iPayment and is based in Nashville.

“He played so many games that eventually he got played himself,” says Masih Madani, the former chief technology officer of CreditCards.com, referring to Mr. Gordon.

But Mr. Gordon didn’t walk away from the enterprise empty-handed. The new owners paid him $2 million to settle his lawsuit against them, according to court documents. Mr. Gordon also ultimately rescued one other prized asset from this first Internet foray: his relationship with Wataru Takahashi and DTI.

RICHARD GORDON has one other man to thank for helping him land on his feet after the CreditCards.com debacle: Paul Irwin, the head of the American Bible Society, who from 1996 to 2004 was chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States.

In his two decades preaching animal rights, Dr. Irwin, an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church, turned the Humane Society into the largest animal welfare charity in the world. But his tenure was also pockmarked by scandal.

USA Today reported in 1987 that the society spent $85,000 renovating Dr. Irwin’s vacation cabin in Maine. A decade later, a judge ordered the organization to pay $1 million to the Humane Society of Canada for soliciting donations in Canada and then transferring funds to the United States.

It was toward the end of his tenure, in April 2003, that Dr. Irwin first hired Mr. Gordon. Tax returns for the Humane Society show that the organization paid $881,000 to Mr. Gordon’s new venture, Exciting New Technologies.

In May 2003, according to a press release at the time, Mr. Gordon also hired Dr. Irwin’s son, Christopher, as director of business development at Exciting New Technologies. The younger Mr. Irwin could not be reached for comment, and it is not clear how long he worked there.

Dr. Irwin said in an interview that Exciting New Technologies built a “technology platform” that allowed the Humane Society to become the top publicly supported animal charity offering help after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A spokesman for the Humane Society says that Dr. Irwin canceled the software project in 2004 and that the organization bought the technology from another company.

Nevertheless, when Dr. Irwin left the Humane Society and took the reins of the American Bible Society, he hired Mr. Gordon again. Dr. Irwin said the organization had multiple Web sites — “everyone and his brother had one” — that needed to be streamlined.

BETWEEN July 2005 and June 2007, tax documents indicate, the Christian charity paid Exciting New Technologies more than $5 million. A spokesman for the philanthropy said that the $5 million in payments involved projects other than Web design, including e-mail marketing and digitizing the Bible, that were performed by subcontractors.

Dr. Irwin said those charges were expensive, but that the organization needed to catch up quickly on the Web. “It was so far behind the curve on Internet development that we simply were in the process of rapidly ramping up,” he said. “The tax form will show next year that we spent a lot less, and the year after that will show we will continue to spend a lot less.”

But questions have been raised inside the Bible society about the payments to Mr. Gordon. One employee — who requested anonymity to avoid Dr. Irwin’s ire — said the tax documents disclose what is “fairly widely known within the walls of A.B.S., and yes, the exorbitant costs have been questioned from the start.”

This person also said that “there have been attempts made to determine where the money is going.”

Dr. Irwin said he was unaware of Mr. Gordon’s ties to the pornography industry. “I have absolutely no knowledge of Richard Gordon’s involvement in pornography,” he said. “If anyone can provide me evidence that he is involved in pornography, then I want you to know he will be out of the American Bible Society today.”

On Friday, after being questioned about its dealings with Mr. Gordon, the society said “the American Bible Society and Richard Gordon have mutually agreed to terminate all existing business relationships.” The society added that it was continuing to investigate Mr. Gordon and his business with the organization.

Dr. Irwin and Mr. Gordon have also apparently intersected on other business transactions as well.

In March 2007, the two men considered redeveloping valuable property that the American Bible Society owns at 1865 Broadway, near Columbus Circle in Manhattan, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Dr. Irwin and Mr. Gordon met with executives at Sonnenblick Goldman, the real estate investment banking firm, about the project, according to a person at the bank who was privy to the discussions but didn’t want to be named disclosing details about a confidential business matter.

The discussions ultimately fell through, in part because Mr. Gordon made an unusual request, this person said: he asked the investment bank to pay him a $20 million commission on the deal out of the firm’s own fee. Asked about these talks, Dr. Irwin said only that “there was no agreement whatsoever.”

Mr. Gordon “would be the last person I would have anything to do with on real estate development in New York City,” Dr. Irwin said. “The American Bible Society has access to world-class developers, and he isn’t one of them.”

Twice this past March, more than a hundred activists gathered on Jean-Talon Road in Montreal to protest what they saw as improprieties at the city’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The protests came after Canadian press reports of possible financial abuses by the Montreal S.P.C.A.’s executive director, Pierre Barnoti. Among other things, Mr. Barnoti was said to have used S.P.C.A. funds for personal travel while engaging in improper fundraising activities and euthanizing an unnecessarily high number of animals.

In April, the protesters prevailed: Mr. Barnoti stepped down and was placed on “indefinite sick leave,” according to the organization. The Canada Revenue Agency, the country’s counterpart of the Internal Revenue Service, began an investigation, and a majority of the charity’s board of directors resigned.

A new board is now combing through the Montreal S.P.C.A.’s financials, trying to reconstruct how the organization wound up more than $4 million in debt. The board is also trying to solve a little Internet mystery: what happened to the organization’s prized Web address, SPCA.com.

Two years ago, a new United States organization called SPCA International took over the SPCA.com Internet domain and started using it to solicit money for animal rights.

According to public records and a report last November in Animal People, an animal care industry newspaper, Mr. Barnoti registered a company called SPCA International in May 2006 in Delaware. Registering an animal rights organization in the United States allowed Mr. Barnoti to raise money here, and he hired a New York City direct mail company to solicit donations.

In an effort to beef up the group’s Web presence, Mr. Barnoti consulted Paul Irwin. In an interview, Dr. Irwin said that he introduced Mr. Barnoti to Richard Gordon.

Mr. Gordon’s company designed the SPCA.com site, and James D. Winston, a longtime business associate of Mr. Gordon, is listed on tax documents as the organization’s executive director. SPCA International declined to make Mr. Winston available for an interview.

It’s not clear how much Mr. Gordon profits from his work on SPCA International. But the chief executives of petsupplies.com, an e-commerce partner listed on the SPCA.com site, and Pet-Togethers, an advertiser on the site, both say their company’s financial relationship is not with SPCA International but with a separate entity, the SPCA Foundation.

According to California corporate records, the foundation was registered as a for-profit company last August by Mr. Gordon’s lawyer, Mr. Woodlief.

As for SPCA International, Mr. Gordon appears to have no operational role there. Even so, the group is involved in a range of initiatives. Every few weeks, the SPCA International selects a “shelter of the week” from around the world and then asks for money for that shelter.

Four of five shelters that were awarded this distinction over the past two months say that they received a $1,000 check and a plaque for the honor — but not a percentage of any donations. The fifth shelter, Welfare of Our Furry Friends, in West Sacramento, Calif., says it received $48.

SPCA International has also undertaken one other significant project. Last year, it created a program called Operation Baghdad Pups that tries to rescue stray dogs in Iraq on behalf of the American soldiers who have befriended them.

The program is run by Terri Crisp, who is primarily known in animal-care circles as the founder of Noah’s Wish, an animal-rescue charity. Last October, Noah’s Wish settled an investigation with the attorney general of California, agreeing to pay $4 million over allegations that it misappropriated donations it received after Hurricane Katrina.

In an interview, Ms. Crisp declined to discuss the Noah’s Wish troubles. But she said SPCA International was “in its infancy” and was trying to “find something unique to make a difference for animals.”

She said she has traveled to Iraq five times to bring 14 dogs back to the United States for soldiers. The program is now prominently promoted on SPCA.com, alongside an ABC News story about it. Donations are solicited to support Baghdad Pups as well as “to further the mission of the SPCA International to stop euthanizing adoptable and healthy animals.”

SPCA International’s fund-raising is hard to assess. Last week, the group filed for an extension on its tax returns. It has yet to reveal how much money it has raised or earned from sponsorships — a requirement for charitable organizations.

Still, the site comes up first on any Google or Yahoo search for the term “SPCA” — ahead of even the 142-year-old American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which has 420 employees and runs a shelter in New York City.

The A.S.P.C.A. declined to comment on SPCA International. But the SPCA.com Web site has angered other animal rights activists who contend that the new organization is exploiting the goodwill of similarly named, more established charities.

Ms. Crisp acknowledged that the organization’s name might mislead people.

“We have people who are trying to reach us that call the A.S.P.C.A. in New York, and we have people who think they are calling the A.S.P.C.A. or contacting their local S.P.C.A. but who call us. We get a lot of that,” she said. “Nobody owns the name, so yeah there’s confusion.”

Back in Canada, meanwhile, the new board members at the Montreal S.P.C.A. are looking at how to get their domain name back.

“If Pierre Barnoti transferred this domain name to another company, that was not in the best interest of the Montreal S.P.C.A.,” said Wendy Adams, a board member and a law professor at McGill University. “It appears he has used this asset to his own benefit. It’s self-dealing, and it’s a breach of fiduciary duty.”

LAST month, Stickam, the live video social network operated by Mr. Takahashi’s DTI, sent out a press release proclaiming a new partnership: the social network had been selected, the release said, as the exclusive provider of live Web video for the SPCA International’s Operation Baghdad Pups and would broadcast regular updates on the program’s progress.

The announcement was ordinary and easy to overlook: two seemingly disparate organizations unveiling a partnership.

But to people who knew the men behind the two companies and their long and fruitful collaboration, it was clear that Richard Gordon and Wataru Takahashi were still looking for new ways to work together.

[Via - NYTimes.Com]

Craig (of the List) Looks Beyond the Web

2008-05-25T03:48:00.001-07:00

Imagine what it might have been like to be Dr. Kleenex. You invent a modern miracle, the cheap paper handkerchief, and suddenly you become the person blamed for America’s disposable culture, praised for a more convenient life, or both.

There never was a Dr. Kleenex, though — the product was created by a team of researchers at Kimberly-Clark laboratories in the 1920s. But there is a real Craig in Craigslist, and lately he is looking at life beyond his little list that happens to be the seventh-most-popular Web site in the United States.

It is also a site that is deeply tied up with the fate of newspapers — indeed, many in the newspaper industry blame the site’s founder, Craig Newmark, for the downturn in their classified-advertising business.

An ardently no-frills, ad-free, user-sensitive site, Craigslist has, by the estimate of its chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, generated more than 600 million free classified listings. (Though nearly all listings remain free, Craigslist has added modest fees for job listings and real estate brokers in certain big cities, and from those fees the company generates $80 million to $100 million in annual revenue. It has a staff of 25, including Mr. Newmark.)

In the United States and beyond, Craigslist is digging even deeper into the classified-ad markets. Once, an announcement that Craigslist was expanding meant adding cities like Miami, Minneapolis and Philadelphia. These days, it means smaller places like Janesville, Wis., (population: about 60,000) and Farmington, N.M., (roughly 38,000) as well as Cebu in the Philippines and, by Mr. Newmark’s request, a site for Ramallah on the West Bank.

In the face of this expansion, Mr. Newmark is becoming more of a public figure, capitalizing on his success to promote causes that include supporting the Barack Obama campaign and financing investigative journalism — not, he insists, to compensate for any damage Craigslist has done to the newspaper business, which he calls “an urban myth.”

Sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco a month ago, explaining his plans in neat mathematical style, Mr. Newmark presented an unassuming public presence. He was perched on an ordinary seat, a six-year-old Prius parked nearby, a Kangol beret on his balding head.

He used to spend two-thirds of his time working on customer service issues (including notifying an Internet service provider about a scammer on the site), he said, and the remaining third on “founder issues,” a catchall term he uses for his public-spirited work. That division, he said, would now be half and half.

But before he can extricate himself from customer issues, Mr. Newmark will have to resolve some of the growing business and legal complexities that surround Craigslist, a laid-back operation that is bumping into tough-minded competitors.

A Delaware lawsuit accuses him and Mr. Buckmaster of boardroom chicanery, an assertion they emphatically deny. Their accuser is the online giant eBay, which became a minority shareholder in 2004, with a stake of roughly 28 percent.

And while officials at Craigslist, including Mr. Newmark, maintain that for many years he has not had a significant leadership role there, the eBay lawsuit describes Mr. Newmark, in addition to being a large shareholder, as chairman (the board has two members; it had been three).

The suit was set in motion by eBay’s decision to introduce a rival online-classified site, Kijiji, in the United States last year. Kijiji is already the market leader in Canada, Germany, Italy and Taiwan.

EBay’s complaint contends that after the Kijiji move, Mr. Newmark and Mr. Buckmaster plotted in secret to dilute eBay’s influence in the company, including an effort to deprive it of its board seat. The lawsuit asks the court to reverse those provisions.

Craigslist is expected to respond to the complaint this month, but on its blog it offered an assessment: “Sadly, we have an uncomfortably conflicted shareholder in our midst, one that is obsessed with dominating online classifieds for the purpose of maximizing its own profits.”

The phrase “maximizing its own profits” broadly outlines the fight between the two companies.

Despite its success, Craigslist prides itself on its grass-roots instincts and user-based content — including harnessing its users to identify and block bad actors on the site. Even broad strategic decisions, such as which areas to expand into, are described as reflecting user requests made at online forums at the site.

As the complaint indicated, last year Mr. Buckmaster wrote to Meg Whitman, then the chief executive of eBay, saying, “We are no longer comfortable having eBay as a shareholder, and wish to explore options for our repurchase, or for otherwise finding a new home for these shares.”

In an e-mail message of its own, eBay stressed that the two companies would remain joined. “We would obviously prefer to see this resolved without litigation,” eBay wrote. “With that said, we will only accept a resolution that preserves our rights and the full value of our investment in Craigslist. We will continue to act openly and in good faith as a minority shareholder.”

The competition between the companies is also heating up outside court. EBay has recently sent e-mail messages to its users promoting Kijiji, and Craigslist in the last few weeks has added 120 cities, half of them overseas, where Kijiji has been dominant.

The Web sites’ expansion comes as newspapers are experiencing a steep downturn in classified advertising, magnified by the badly depressed housing market and weaker overall economy. Print classified advertising declined 16 percent last year, to $14.2 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America, below the 1996 level, even without adjusting for inflation.

In this straitened market, Craigslist becomes shorthand for the threat that online advertising outlets are seen as posing to newspapers.

Mr. Buckmaster responds, saying that Craigslist has no sales force and has not sought to win over newspaper advertisers, in contrast to companies like the job-listing site Monster. “That to me is a direct attack on newspapers,” he said. “We put a service out there.”

“There are bigger things that have been more problematic for newspapers,” he added, including circulation losses and basic mismanagement. “Newspapers have an enormous amount of debt. That is not something that can be laid at our doorstep.”

Clayton Frink is the publisher of The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., where Craigslist arrived in 2005. The newspaper late last month stopped printing daily, adopting a Web strategy and printing weekly.

“They have ads we would have had once upon a time,” he said, but added that his staff did not consider it “No. 1 or No. 2 or 3 of Web sites that hurt our business.” The bigger enemy, he said, is the changing marketplace, noting that large employers used to buy a page and a half for job listings and “now they put in a small ad saying to see their Web site.”

“What Craigslist does well is build a community and a feel of a community,” he said. “Building communities is going to be critical for any online product, whether a newspaper or not.”

Also, Craigslist no longer sneaks up on local newspapers. Sammy Lopez, publisher of The Daily Times in Farmington, said: “We’ve been kind of watching them. You can get on Craigslist and see if people have been requesting a site. I asked someone to look at that four or five months ago, and saw that they had.”

He said the knowledge that Craigslist would be arriving someday led the paper to improve its online presentation of classified ads, creating more categories and clear entry points. He noted that a vibrant classified-ad section was both a revenue source and a reason that people buy the paper and visit the Web site.

Mr. Newmark is a believer in the power of technology to improve life — whether in the blogging he does for Mr. Obama, a visit he recently made to Israel where he argued in favor of microloans and technological innovation to build up the Palestinian economy, or the use of online tools to make government more transparent.

He promotes these projects on his personal blog. As of the last couple of weeks, he has been writing posts on Twitter.com, too.

The list of good-government and good-journalism Web sites Mr. Newmark is involved with — sometimes financially, but more often as adviser and advocate in the Silicon Valley world — speak for themselves: factcheck.org, sunlightfoundation.com, PRWatch.org, NewsTrust.net, publicintegrity.org.

An article in The Observer of London two years ago described him as “readying his armory of cash to invest in citizen journalism projects.” Mr. Newmark says he never donated more than $20,000 to any organization.

But he has not followed the common path to Silicon Valley philanthropy — create a successful Web site, sell the Web site either to a larger company or through an initial public offering, acquire a pile of cash, then give away part of that.

While unwilling to discuss his wealth, he said he could be a lot richer if he wanted to. “We know these guys in Google and the eBay guys,“ he said, “and they are not any happier than anyone else. A lot of money is a burden.”

[Via - NYTimes.com]

What Presidential Candidates Don't talk About

2008-05-25T03:46:00.000-07:00

Those were the words that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke used to describe the financial markets (and by extension the economy) these heady spring days when everybody else with a rostrum, it seems, has pronounced the so-called liquidity crisis contained. There's a great wish for American finance to return to business-as-usual -- raking in fantastic fees for innovating new modes of tradable paper, and engineering mergers and buy-outs that generate huge fees plus $100 million kiss-offs for corporate CEOs in the noble struggle to dismantle America's productive capacity -- but apparently events are still out of hand.

The Federal Reserve itself has been instrumental in promoting abnormality by doing everything possible to prevent the work-out of bad debts in the system. Since money is loaned into existence, and loans are debts, the work-out of bad debt suggests the discovery that a lot of money has disappeared -- which is exactly the case. The Fed has postponed the work-out by sucking up truckloads of impaired, untradable securities in exchange for loans to giant banks who don't have enough cash on hand to pay their janitors.
Personally, my theory has been that the specter of peak oil pretty clearly implies the inability of industrial economies to continue producing real wealth in the customary way. In the face of this, either consciously or at a more mystical level, the worker bees in banking recognize that, in order to maintain their villas in the Hamptons, money has to be loaned into existence some other way (than in the service of industrial productivity).
We've tried just about everything else. There was the so-called service economy, an attempt to replace manufacturing with hamburger sales. Then there was the information economy, in which work would be replaced with knowing about stuff. Then there was the tech thing, which was about bringing internet companies that existed only on the back of cocktail napkins to the initial public offering stage of capitalization -- which allowed a few-hundred-or-so thirty-year-old smoothies to retire to vineyards in the Napa Valley, while hundreds of thousands of retirees lost half the value of their investment portfolios. Then there was the housing boom, which was all about the creation of more suburban sprawl under the theory that houses (or "homes" in the jargon of the realtors) represent an obvious sort of wealth, and therefore that using houses as collateral would allow humongous sums of money to be loaned into existence -- along with massive fees for structuring the loans into bundles of bond-like thingies.
This has all failed now because the racket went too far. Every possible candidate for a snookering got snookered. Too much collateral for which there were no takers went into the ground. The insane run-up in house values made a downward price movement inevitable, and as soon as the turnaround happened, it fell into the remorseless algebra of a deflationary death spiral. More importantly, however, this society ran out of tricks for loaning money into existence and instead began to experience the pain of money thought-to-be-in-existence being defaulted into a vapor -- and worse, these defaults led to logarithmic chains of money destruction in its places of origin, the investment banks that had created the racket.
The important part of this is that the money is gone. What makes matters truly eerie is that the "bubble" in suburban houses has occurred at exactly the moment in history when the chief enabling resource for suburban life -- oil -- has entered its scarcity stage.
The logical conclusion of all this is not what the American public wants to hear: we have become a much poorer society and are now faced with the unavoidable task of making major changes in how we live. All the three-card-monte moves at the highest level of finance lately amount to an effort to avoid the unavoidable, acknowledging our losses. Certainly the political fallout of all this will be awesome. But it's not about politics, really. It's about the entire society's inability to form a workable new consensus of reality.
It's hard to predict how long these institutions at the heart of our economic system can linger in the "far from normal" limbo of pretending that money has not been defaulted out of existence. Since the same process is underway in Great Britain and Spain, places beyond the control of Bernanke, Secretary Paulson, and the Boyz on Wall Street, and since actions and reactions there will affect the destiny of money here, its hard to escape the conclusion that we're at most months away from the brutal recognition that Wall Street has managed to bankrupt itself (and, by extension, the United States). This is dark heart of the matter of which no one dares speak.
Meantime, on the ground, every mook and minion in the land sees the gas pumps levitate beyond the $4 hash mark, and notes with bugged-out eyes the double-digit price stickers on common supermarket items, and feels the rush of blood from the extremities when some check-out clerk at the WalMart declares that a certain proffered credit card is maxed out, and some strangers in overalls -- the neighbors say -- managed to hot-wire the GMC Sierra in the driveway, and took it away....
The candidates for president will have a lot to talk about. I wonder if they'll dare to.

Nagging Your Ways To Big Bucks

2008-05-25T03:33:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's ever tried to lose weight or improve their fitness knows that it can sometimes be tough to get motivated. For those who need a little extra help getting going, a new service called WeightNags will nag customers mercilessly until they get off the couch and get some exercise.

WeightNags, which was just launched by Texas-based ConnectWorks Media, needs nothing more than a customer's email address to get started. In exchange, it will hound that customer once a week for free in the hopes of motivating him or her to exercise and lose some weight. Of course, we all know that emails can easily be ignored and deleted in the blink of an eye. Customers who don't trust themselves to take WeightNag's emails seriously can also request weekly nags by phone. All they need to provide is their phone number and first name; the cost is USD 4.95 per month.

Without a way to tell WeightNags when you do get some exercise in or have resisted every single calorie-laden temptation—and thereby win a respite from the nagging—it seems to us the effectiveness of the negative feedback could soon wear off. Nevertheless, it's an interesting concept that could be a nice micro-business opportunity for anyone with a Skype account and a talent for nagging.

Profit From Bugs

2008-05-25T03:31:00.000-07:00

Seth Prezant and his wife were discussing what to do for their son’s fifth birthday party.

The thought of paying money for birthday clowns, bounce-houses, and cartoon characters were not appealing and there seemed to be few available educational venues that also offered entertainment for children’s parties. Prezant’s son loved animals, especially bugs.

So Prezant decided to put together a “bug show” and be the creepy crawly entertainment. He did a great deal of bug research, caught many bugs (some caught him), and the birthday bug show was a hit!

Prezant then took his show to various schools and a bug business was born. This lead to a web site where you can buy cool bug catchers, bug houses, magnifying lenses, and the latest and greatest bug toys and games.

CNN-IBN Exit Poll predicts Hung Assembly in Karnataka, NDTV Exit Poll favours BJP

2008-05-25T03:12:00.000-07:00

The third and final phase of the Karnataka assembly polls is over. At least 61% voters exercised their franchise for the 69 assembly segments that went to polls on Thursday. The exit poll conducted by the CNN-IBN has predicted a hung assembly in Karnataka again, but the NDTV exit poll has given a narrow mandate to the BJP. The JD(S) may again emerge as a king maker once the results are out even as the main battle is between the Congress and BJP.

The CNN-IBN Exit Poll:

The CNN-IBN, in collaboration with the Deccan Herald and CSS, have conducted the exit poll in various parts of the state. According to their prediction, Congress will get 86 seats, while the BJP will end up with 79 seats. The swing could go either way, as there is a neck-to-neck contest between both parties. The JD(S) is projected to get 45 seats, while the others may get 14 seats. The total number of seats in Karnataka assembly is 224.

According to CNN-IBN exit poll, there is a 4 percent negative swing against the Congress, while the BJP may get a 2 percent positive swing it its favour. Congress is heading for a gain among the Backwards, Dalits, Muslims, Women and Poor. The BJP will gain among the Lingayats, Upper caste people, Urban voters and Youth. Interestingly, BJP leader Yeddyurappa is the most preferred CM among the voters with 27% votes. Kumaraswamy is on second spot with 22%. Congress leader SM Krishna is lying on a poor third with just 16%.

The NDTV Exit Poll:

The NDTV exit poll yet again gave an advantage to BJP in the third phase elections. Out of the 69 seats, it gave BJP 30-40 seats, while the Congress is predicted to get 20-30 seats, while the JD(S) may get 10-12 seats. The overall result is quite encouraging for the BJP. The NDTV exit poll predicted that BJP would get 95-115 seats. That means, it has a chance of getting a simple majority (112 seats).

According to the NDTV exit poll, the Congress is likely to suffer heavy losses, as it may end up with 55-75 seats. Thus, the party may fall way behind the simple majority mark. The JD(S) is expected to get 45-55 seats, while the others will get 10-15 seats. Even if there is a swing of votes, the BJP is likely to emerge as a single largest party in Karnataka assembly with a good number of seats to its credit.

How To Build A $300 Million Domain Name Empire

2008-03-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

Kevin Ham leans forward, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type -- into the air. He's seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas's Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block.

As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It's the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it's a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner?

When Ham wants a domain, he leans over and quietly instructs an associate to bid on his behalf. He likes wedding names, so his guy lifts the white paddle and snags Weddingcatering.com for $10,000. Greeting.com is not nearly as good as the plural Greetings.com, but Ham grabs it anyway, for $350,000.

Ham is a devout Christian, and he spends $31,000 to add Christianrock.com to his collection, which already includes God.com and Satan.com. When it's all over, Ham strolls to the table near the exit and writes a check for $650,000. It's a cheap afternoon.

Just a few years ago, most of the guys bidding in this room had never laid eyes on one another. Indeed, they rarely left their home computers. Now they find themselves in a Vegas ballroom surrounded by deep-pocketed bankers, venture-backed startups, and other investors trying to get a piece of the action.

And why not? In the past three years alone, the number of dotcom names has soared more than 130 percent to 66 million. Every two seconds, another joins the list.

But the big money is in the aftermarket, where the most valuable names -- those that draw thousands of pageviews and throw off steady cash from Google's and Yahoo's pay-per-click ads -- are driving prices to dizzying heights. People who had the guts and foresight to sweep up names shed during the dotcom bust are now landlords of some of the most valuable real estate on the Web.

The man at the top of this little-known hierarchy is Kevin Ham -- one of a handful of major-league "domainers" in the world and arguably the shrewdest and most ambitious of the lot. Even in a field filled with unusual career paths, Ham's stands out.

Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. (Like all his financial details, Ham would neither confirm nor deny this figure.)

Working mostly as a solo operator, Ham has looked for every opening and exploited every angle -- even inventing a few of his own -- to expand his enterprise. Early on, he wrote software to snag expiring names on the cheap. He was one of the first to take advantage of a loophole that allows people to register a name and return it without cost after a free trial, on occasion grabbing hundreds of thousands of names in one swoop.

And what few people know is that he's also the man behind the domain world's latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name.

Try it with almost any name you can think of -- Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm -- and you'll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo.

Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad -- as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code -- just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.

The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well.

"It's in the works," Ham says over lunch in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. "That's why I can't talk about it." He's nearly as reluctant to share details about his newest company, called Reinvent Technology, into which he's investing tens of millions of dollars to build a powerhouse of Internet businesses around his most valuable properties.

Given Ham's reach on the Web -- his sites receive 30 million unique visitors a month -- it's remarkable that so few people know about him. Even in the clubby world of domainers, he's a mystery man. Until now Ham has never talked publicly about his business. You won't find his name on any domain registration, nor will you see it on the patent application for the Cameroon trick.

There are practical reasons for the low profile: For one, Ham's success has drawn enemies, many of them rivals. He once used a Vancouver post office box for domain-related mail -- until the day he opened a package that contained a note reading "You are a piece of s**t," accompanied by an actual piece of it.

Bitter domainers are one thing, lawyers another. And at the moment, Ham's biggest concern is that corporate counsels will come after him claiming that the Cameroon typo scheme is an abuse of their trademarks. He may be right, since this is the first time he's been identified as the orchestrator.

When asked about the .cm play, John Berryhill, a top domain attorney who doesn't work for Ham, practically screams into the phone, "You know who did that? Do you have any idea how many people want to know who's behind that?"

Kevin Ham is a boyish-looking 37-year-old, trim from a passion for judo and a commitment to clean living. His drink of choice: grapefruit juice, no ice. His mild demeanor belies the aggressive, work-around-the-clock type that he is. Ham frequently steers conversations about business back to the Bible. Not in a preachy way; it's just who he is.

The son of Korean-born immigrants, Ham grew up on the east side of Vancouver with his three brothers. His father ran dry-cleaning stores; his mother worked graveyard shifts as a nurse. A debilitating illness at the age of 14 led Ham to dream of becoming a doctor. He cruised through high school and then undergraduate work and medical school at the University of British Columbia.

Christianity had long been a mainstay with his family, but as an undergrad, he made the Bible a focal point of his life; he joined the Evangelical Layman's Church and attended regular Bible meetings. Ham recalls that it was about this time -- 1992 or 1993 -- that he was introduced to the Web. A church friend told him about a powerful new medium that could be used to spread the gospel.

"Those words really struck me," Ham says. "It's the reason I'm still working."

After he graduated from med school in 1998, Ham and his new bride took off for London, Ontario, for a two-year residency. By the second year, Ham had become chief resident, and when he wasn't rushing to the emergency room, he indulged his growing fascination with the Net, teaching himself to create websites and to code in Perl.

Information about Web hosting at the time was so scattered that Ham began creating an online directory of providers, complete with reviews and ratings of their services. He called it Hostglobal.com.

From there it was a short step to the business of buying and selling domains. About six months after he launched Hostglobal, Ham was earning around $10,000 per month in ad sales. But when one of his advertisers -- a service that sold domain registrations -- told him that a single ad was generating business worth $1,500 a month, Ham figured he could get in on that too.

It made sense: People shopping for hosting services were often interested in buying a catchy URL, so Ham launched a second directory, called DNSindex.com. Like similar services operating at the time, it gave customers a way to register domain names.

But Ham added the one feature that early domain hunters wanted most: weekly lists of available names, compiled using free sources he found on the Web. Some lists he gave away; others he charged as much as $50 for. In a couple of months, he had more than 5,000 customers.

By the time he finished his residency in June 2000, his two small Web ventures were pulling in more money in a month -- sometimes $40,000 -- than Ham made that year at the hospital. That was enough, he reasoned, to put off starting a medical practice for three more months, maybe six. "It just didn't make sense not to do it," he says.

With a new baby in tow, Ham and his wife moved back to Vancouver, settling into a one-bedroom apartment. Ham's timing, it turned out, was spot-on. Tech stocks were tumbling, dotcoms were folding left and right, and investors were fleeing the Web. More important to him, hundreds of thousands of valuable domain names that were suddenly considered worthless began to expire, or "drop." Ham and a handful of other trailblazers were ready to snap them up.

Figuring out when names would drop was tedious work.

At the time, Network Solutions controlled the best names; it was for a long time the only retail company, or registrar, selling .coms. It didn't say when expiring names would go back on the market, but twice a day it published the master list of all registered names -- the so-called "root zone" file (now managed by VeriSign (Charts)). It was a fat list of well over 5 million names that took hours to download and often crashed the under-powered PCs of the day.

So Ham wrote software scripts that compared one day's list with the next. Then he tracked names that vanished from the root file. Those names would be listed briefly as on hold, and Ham figured out that they would almost always drop five or six days later -- at about 3:30 a.m. on the West Coast. In the dark of night, Ham launched his attacks, firing up five PCs and multiple browsers in each. Typing furiously, he would enter his buy requests and bounce from one keyboard to the next until he snagged the names he wanted.

He missed a lot of them, of course.

Ham had no clue that there were rivals out there who were way ahead him, deploying software that purchased names at a rate that Ham's fingers couldn't match. Through registration data, he eventually traced many of those purchases to one owner: "NoName." Behind the shadowy moniker was another reclusive domain pioneer, a Chinese-born programmer named Yun Ye, who, according to people who know him, operated out of his house in Fremont, Calif.

By day Ye worked as a software developer. At night he unleashed the programs that automated domain purchases. (Ye achieved deity status among domainers in 2004 when he sold a portfolio of 100,000 names to Marchex , a Seattle-based, publicly traded search marketing firm, for $164 million. He then moved to Vancouver.)

Ham went back to the keyboard, writing scripts so that he, too, could pound at the registrars. Ham's track record began to improve, but he still wasn't satisfied. "Yun was just too good," he says.

Then Ham did something brash: He bought his way to the front of the line. Since registrars had direct connections to Network Solutions's servers, Ham's play was to cut out the middleman. He struck deals with several discount registrars, even helping them write software to ensure that they captured the names Ham wanted to buy during the drops. In exchange for the exclusivity, Ham offered to pay as much as $100 for some names that might normally go for as little as $8.

Within weeks Ham had struck so many deals that, according to rivals, he controlled most of the direct connections. "I kept telling them to hit them harder," Ham says in a rare boastful moment. "We brought down the servers many times." During one six-month period starting in late 2000, Ham registered more than 10,000 names.

Rival domainers, locked out of much of the action, didn't appreciate Ham's tactics. It was one of them, most likely, who sent him the turd. "Kevin came in and closed the door for everyone else," says Frank Schilling, a domainer who figured out what Ham had done and sealed similar deals. "There was a ton of professional jealousy."

Ham, in fact, owes a lot to Schilling. Both men lived in Vancouver at the time, and after Ham sought out Schilling in November 2000, the two met at a restaurant to compare notes.

"How much traffic do you have?" Schilling asked. An embarrassed Ham replied that he had no idea. Schilling mentioned that he was experimenting with a new service, GoTo.com, that would populate his domains with ads. Ham spent the next week figuring out how much traffic his sites were generating, and he was amazed by the initial tally: 8,000 unique visitors per day from the 375 names he owned at the time.

"From then on," Ham says, "I knew that what I was building would be very, very valuable." He soon signed up with GoTo (which was later purchased by Yahoo). On his first day, Ham made $1,500.

The system worked then as it does now: People don't always use Google or Yahoo to find something on the Web; they'll often type what they're looking for into a browser's address bar and add ".com."

It's a practice known as "direct navigation," or type-in traffic, and millions do it. Need wedding shoes? Type in "weddingshoes.com" -- a site that Ham happens to own -- and you'll land on what looks like a shoe-shopping portal, filled with links from dozens of retailers.

Click on any one of those links, and the advertiser that placed it pays Yahoo, which in turn pays a cut to Ham. That single site, Ham says, brings in $9,100 a year. Small change, maybe, but the name cost him $8, and his annual overhead for it is about $7. Multiply that model several thousand times over, and you get a quick idea of the kind of cash machine that Ham was creating from his living room.

By early 2002, roughly $1 million a year was pouring into Ham's operation, which he ran with the help of his high school friend and current partner, Colin Yu. But again he felt the tug of his conscience. He occasionally left Vancouver to do medical missionary stints, helping patients in Mexico, the Philippines, and China. He found the experience rewarding, but the development boom he saw taking off in China just reminded him of the virtual real estate boom he was leading back home.

Soon Ham was back working full-time on the Web. "There was just too much more to do," he says.

There was no looking back. The next few years were among Ham's most aggressive. One of his most valuable tricks was one he had experimented with in the early days, a practice called domain "tasting." Tasting takes advantage of a provision that allows domain-name buyers a free five-day trial period. Intended to protect customers who mistakenly purchase the wrong name, it handed aggressive domainers another means with which to expand -- and exploit -- their portfolios.

Ham cobbled together new lists of domain words in every combination, registering hundreds of thousands of new names for free, monitoring the traffic, and then returning the duds. By 2004, Ham had amassed such a deep portfolio that he pulled his names from third-party registrars, launched his own registrar, and then created another company, appropriately named Hitfarm, that could do a better job than Yahoo of matching ads with domain names -- for himself and 100 or so other domainers.

Like any shopping spree, though, Ham's tasting binge didn't last. It brought in so many names -- offbeat strings of letters, names with too many dashes, and other variations that humans would be hard-pressed to think of -- that Ham saw the quality of his portfolio dropping in proportion to its growing size. For every few thousand names he'd register, he'd toss back all but a hundred or so.

Tasting exacerbated another problem too: Ham's software grabbed all kinds of typographical variations of trademarked names. Called typo-squatting, it's a practice now coming under the same intense scrutiny long faced by cybersquatters. Microsoft and Neiman Marcus are just two companies whose lawyers have brought anti-cybersquatting lawsuits, charging domainers with intentionally profiting from variations of their trademarks.

"Tasting changed everything," says Ham, who has since abandoned the practice, though he concedes that Hitfarm still holds some problematic names. "I said, forget it," he says. "Generic names are already too hard to come by. And the legal risks are too great."

The legal risks should diminish, however, if you don't own the domain names at all -- and that's the secret behind the Cameroon play.

The domain confab in Vegas is like any other trade conference: The real intrigue happens at cocktail hour. One subject in the air is Cameroon. Late last summer, domainers began noticing that something odd happens to .cm traffic: It all winds up at a site called Agoga.com. Domainers know, of course, that .cm belongs to Cameroon. And they know that whoever controls Agoga.com has created a potential gold mine.

What they don't know is who's behind it all.

At one of the meet-and-greets, Ham is standing drinkless, as usual, sporting a polo shirt, chatting with a few people he knows and some he's just met. In this crowd, it seems, everyone wants to know Ham. Finally, he is alone.

"I hear you're the guy behind .cm?"

Ham looks surprised by the reporter's question, then flashes a big smile and says, "I had help."

Over a series of conversations a few weeks later in Vancouver, Ham shares some details about a deal that, despite his innate reticence, he's clearly proud of. About a year ago, he says, he worked his contacts to gain connections to government officials in Cameroon. Then he flew several confidantes to Yaound?, the capital, to make their pitch. His key programmer went along to handle the technical details.

"Hey," Ham says, flagging his techie down near the office elevator. "Didn't you meet with the president of Cameroon?"

"Nah," the programmer says. "We met with the prime minister. But we did see the president's compound."

It's an odd scene to picture: a domainer's reps in a sit-down with Ephraim Inoni, the prime minister of Cameroon, to discuss the power of type-in typo traffic and pay-per-click ads. And yet, as with most of the angles Ham has played, the Cameroon scheme is ingeniously straightforward.

Ham's people installed a line of software, called a "wildcard," that reroutes traffic addressed to any .cm domain name that isn't registered. In the case of Cameroon, a country of 18 million with just 167,000 computers connected to the Internet, that means hundreds of millions of names. Type in "paper.cm" and servers owned by Camtel, the state-owned company that runs Cameroon's domain registry, redirect the query to Ham's Agoga.com servers in Vancouver.

The servers fill the page with ads for paper and office-supply merchants. (Officials at Yahoo confirm that the company serves ads for Ham's .cm play.) It all happens in a flash, and since Ham doesn't own or register the names, he's not technically typo-squatting, according to several lawyers who handle Internet issues.

The method is spelled out in a patent application filed by a Vancouver businessman named Robert Seeman, who Ham says is his partner in the venture and who also serves as chief adviser at Reinvent Technology. (Seeman declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Ham won't reveal specifics but says Agoga receives "in the ballpark" of 8 million unique visitors per month. Fellow domainers, naturally, are envious.

"As soon as it started happening, there was a huge sense of 'Why didn't I think of that?'" says attorney Berryhill, who represents Schilling and other domainers.

Still, several companies have already tracked down Ham's attorneys, claiming trademark infringement. Ham argues that his system is legally in the clear because it treats every.cm typo equally and doesn't filter out trademarked names.

Berryhill concurs. "You can't really say that [wildcarding] is targeting trade-marks," he says. "It captures all the traffic, not just trademark traffic." Moreover, the anti-cybersquatting statute applies only to people who register a trademarked domain; using a wildcard doesn't require registering names.

Clever though it may be, .cm is "a very small part of our operations," Ham says. He won't disclose how much he pays to the government of Cameroon, whose officials could not be reached for comment.

The partnership has been a rocky one so far, and the system has sporadically shut down. But .cm is only one of several country domains where the typo play can work. According to Ham, he and his team are working with other governments. The dream typo play -- .co -- belongs to Colombia, to which Ham says Seeman paid several visits long before they began working on Cameroon. (Citing safety concerns, Ham hasn't yet made the trip. "I would only go if the president requests to meet me," he says.)

As for other countries he might soon invade, Oman (.om) is an obvious target. Niger and Ethiopia are out there too, but since they would play off less lucrative .net typos, they might not be worth the trouble.

As for Colombia, Ham says, "we're making progress."

Ham leans over his office PC to check on a domain auction. Steven Sacks, a domainer based in Indianapolis who works for Ham, is telling him about some names up for sale. Ham shoots back an instant message: "I like doctordegree.com ... and rockquarry.com ... sunblinds.com."

The days of figuring out the drop are long over. Everything's open now. Lists are easy to obtain. You can preorder a name before it drops and hope to get it. Or, like Ham, you can shell out five or six figures in online auctions. The only great deals, at least for .com names, tend to happen privately, when a domainer manages to find an eager or naive seller.

Ham still buys 30 to 100 names a day, but he's no longer getting them on the cheap. In fact, he and Schilling, who today maintains a $20 million-a-year portfolio from his home in the Cayman Islands, are often accused of driving up prices.

Take, for example, the $26,250 Ham paid for Fruitgiftbaskets.com, or the $171,250 for Hoteldeals.com. "The amount he will pay is crazy," says Bob Martin, president of Internet REIT, a domain investment firm that has raised more than $125 million from private investors, including Maveron, the venture firm backed by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.

Nonsense, Ham says. The names are expensive only if you value them the way people like Martin do. The VCs and bankers, who were late to the domain gold rush, assess names by calculating the pay-per-click ad revenue and attaching a multiple based on how long it would take to pay off the investment.

Viewed that way, Ham's personal portfolio alone is worth roughly $300 million. But some of Ham's recent domain purchases would also look silly: They'd take 15 or 20 years just to justify the price, and that assumes continuation of the pay-per-click model.

But Ham is taking a longer view. The Web, he says, is becoming cluttered with parked pages. The model is amazingly efficient -- lots of money for little work --but Ham argues that Internet users will soon grow weary of it all.

He also expects Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to find ways to effectively combat typo-squatting. Some browsers can already fix typos; Internet Explorer catches unregistered domains and redirects visitors to a Microsoft page -- in effect controlling traffic the same way that Ham is doing with .cm. "The heat is rising," Ham says.

When Ham buys a domain now, he's not doing pay-per-click math but rather sizing it up as a potential business. Reinvent Technology aims to turn his most valuable names into mini media companies, based on hundreds of niche categories.

Among the first he'd like to launch, not surprisingly, is Religion.com. Ham recently leased the entire 27th floor in his Vancouver building and is now hiring more than 150 designers, engineers, salespeople, and editorial folks.

Much of that effort is going into developing search tools based more on meaning and less on keywords. "Google is only so useful," Ham says.

The aim is to apply a meaning-based, or "semantic," system across swaths of sites, luring customers from direct navigation and search engines alike. Religion.com would then become an anchor to which scores of other sites would be tied.

"It's time to build out the virtual real estate," Ham says. "There's so much more value in these names than pay-per-click." Seeman's patent application even mentions the possibility of turning Web traffic from Cameroon and other future foreign partners into full-fledged portals.

It's all part of the master plan, as Ham aims to become the first domainer to move from the ranks of at-home name hunter to Internet titan. Smaller players have been selling out to VC-backed groups, and Ham expects that the best names will eventually be owned by just a handful of companies.

If he bets right, he might very well be one of them. "If you control all the domains," he says, "then you control the Internet."

[Via - The man who owns the Internet]

Voting for the Worst on ‘American Idol’ Makes Money for an Entrepreneur

2008-03-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

There is something about “American Idol” that extracts intense emotions from the audience: devotion for the contestants, perhaps, or passion for the songs. For Dave Della Terza, it elicits utter disgust. But it also turns a profit.

Frustrated by what he called the manipulative nature of the televised singing competition, Mr. Della Terza started encouraging readers of a reality television message board five years ago to vote for the contestants they deemed the worst singers.

The idea spawned a Web site, Vote for the Worst, which received widespread attention last year for supporting the singer Sanjaya Malakar as he advanced in the competition.

For Mr. Della Terza, what started as a hobby has become a business. Last year, the site had revenue of roughly $40,000, Mr. Della Terza said, mostly through Google Ads. While some of the income paid for computer servers and legal fees, the site still made a profit, allowing Mr. Della Terza to take some days off work to maintain the increasingly popular site.

Mr. Della Terza is far from the only person cashing in on the “American Idol” juggernaut. The publisher of the popular “Chicken Soup for the Soul” book series is promoting an Idol-themed edition. Walt Disney World is adding an Idol attraction to its Hollywood Studios theme park. Royal Caribbean International is embarking on Idol cruises.

But Vote for the Worst is unique, not only because it openly mocks the competition but also because it was formed spontaneously by an Internet-connected group of television viewers.

“It didn’t start out as a moneymaking venture; it wasn’t an attempt to leech off the ‘American Idol’ brand,” Mr. Della Terza said. “It started as a joke. But people really enjoyed it.”

The site now routinely breaks “Idol” news. In the first week of March, the site recorded 2.7 million page views as it reported rumors that a contestant, David Hernandez, had a background as a male stripper. Mr. Hernandez was voted off the show last week.

Mr. Della Terza said he did not expect to resemble a gossip columnist anytime soon. Still, the site has unintentionally become a font of “Idol” stories. Reports by Vote for the Worst in January that two “Idol” contestants had professional singing backgrounds subsequently became fodder for the news media. (Any person who is not under contract is eligible to audition.)

“We always post stuff on the site the producers don’t want you to know,” Mr. Della Terza said. “We don’t go out of our way to dig up dirt, but if it falls in our laps, obviously we’ll post it.”

The site’s fame rose last season when the radio personality Howard Stern repeatedly mentioned the site and encouraged listeners to vote to keep Mr. Malakar on the show.

In a conference call with reporters last month, Nigel Lythgoe, the executive producer of “American Idol,” said he did not believe online voting campaigns have any effect. “There are too many people who vote,” he said.

Still, Mr. Lythgoe’s mention of Vote for the Worst testified to the site’s significance, which still seems to surprise Mr. Della Terza, 25, an Illinois resident who works in information technology and teaches part time at a community college. A camera crew from a local television station once walked into his classroom to request an interview, he said, prompting him to conceal some details about his personal life from that point on. A volunteer now handles media requests for the site.

Mr. Della Terza started watching “Idol” in its second season. By season four, the worst-vote effort moved to its own Web site; in season five of “Idol,” the site turned a modest profit; and last year, Mr. Della Terza’s site became a limited liability company to help protect its operators from any potential legal action. The show is now in it’s seventh season.

The production company responsible for “American Idol,” FremantleMedia, has delivered three cease-and-desist letters to the site, most recently in January, accusing the site of using copyrighted content without permission. A lawyer representing the site argued that fair use covered most of the content, but the site agreed to remove the “Idol” logo from its pages.

The site’s success has prompted Mr. Della Terza to ponder the post-“Idol” future of the so-bad-it’s-good brand.

“We have to think long term somehow and try to keep the site going,” he said in an interview last week. Mr. Della Terza, who had a star turn on “The Late Show With David Letterman” last year, has batted around a television show proposal with friends, but he said laughingly that “no one’s come calling about that yet.”

For now, the site is sticking with “Idol.” Mr. Della Terza’s efforts to elicit votes for the worst contestants on other reality shows, including “The Next Great American Band” and “America’s Got Talent,” never held the same appeal.

“It’s never as fun,” Mr. Della Terza said. “I don’t think people take those shows as seriously.”

[Via - NYTimes.Com]

How To Make Money From Baby Posters

2008-03-27T08:25:00.000-07:00

Consumers are never too young for a little gravanity, particularly when proud parents are buying it for them. Enter 5starbaby.com, which offers personalized birth announcements fashioned after movie advertisement posters.

Each movie poster birth announcement from 5starbaby is tailor-made for the new arrival, complete with all the critical “stats” about the baby’s birth and the names of loved ones as "supporting cast." Parents are listed as "producers," the doctor is named as "director" and the hospital is listed as the "filmed in" setting, for example. "Critics' quotes" can also be included, as can "catering" by the mother and options for virtually any other special people or ideas the parents want listed. "Ratings" given are "B" for boy, "G" for girl or "T" for twins. Movie poster birth announcements are 5-by-8-inch mini posters; pricing begins at USD 2.50 each with envelopes included. 5starbaby.com also offers large poster formats ranging from USD 25 to USD 120 each, and gift certificates are available for baby showers or other occasions.

Buffalo, NY-based 5starbaby.com will ship orders anywhere in the world, but localized versions in other languages are a natural next step. One to bring to proud parents and gift-givers around the globe!

Small Businesses Offer Alternatives to Gang Life

2008-03-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

In Los Angeles, a corporation that runs several small businesses is demonstrating that the training and discipline of working in a small company can make a big contribution to changing the lives of former gang members.

The corporation, Homeboy Industries, runs a silkscreen business, for example, that produced revenue of $1.1 million last year from sales of custom T-shirts and other apparel for radio stations running promotions and college and private groups holding events. The business employs former gang members to make the T-shirts and uses the money to help offset the corporation’s expenses. Homeboy Silkscreen started 12 years ago in a converted warehouse under a freeway overpass near downtown Los Angeles and now has 18 employees.

Homeboy Bakery has a new plant that has $3 million in ovens and machinery and its managers hope to produce millions of dollars in revenue within a year or two, said the master baker, Alvaro Ocegueda. He supervises 25 former gang members who have become bakers under his guidance and with professional training at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, a two-year community college.

There is also a Homegirl Café, that has a staff of 27 girls who were “gang impacted” either as auxiliary gang members or as residents of neighborhoods under gang influence. The cafe has brought in more than $220,000 in five months of serving breakfast and lunch six days a week, said Patricia Zarate, who cooks for and manages the business.

Homeboy Maintenance takes in about $6,000 a month, and a Homeboy retail store sold $25,000 in Homeboy shirts and caps in a recent three-month period.

Though it may sound like a budding conglomerate, Homeboy is a nonprofit charitable corporation that last year had a budget of $5 million and goals that emphasize rehabilitation over revenue.

“The aim of the cash-producing businesses is that they bring in enough to pay for the free services,” said the Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries in East Los Angeles two decades ago and is now its executive director. Those services include mental therapy for former gang members, housing assistance, job development counseling and tattoo removal treatments.

The tattoo removals are not a fashion statement but a safety concern. Gang tattoos are a marker of the rivalries among the 26,000 members of Los Angeles’s 250 gangs, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Many gangs have been in existence for decades, and, police department figures show, their activities in the last five years have resulted in 12,000 assaults, 10,000 robberies, 784 homicides and 500 rapes.

Twenty years ago, when he was assigned to Dolores Mission Church, the poorest parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles , Father Boyle decided to try employment as a way to break the cycle of gangs, crime and imprisonment for the neighborhood’s young men. He tried to persuade businesses to hire reforming gang members through a parish organization he called Jobs for a Future. Then, in 1992, he bought an abandoned bakery with a contribution from Ray Stark, the Hollywood producer (“Funny Girl,”, “California Suite,” and “Annie” among others). Father Boyle put a half dozen former gang members — “homeboys” in street parlance — to work cleaning up the bakery and producing tortillas for sale. Tortilla sales led to making bread for a large baking company that supplied restaurants.

That ultimately led to Homeboy bakers being trained at Mi Vida-My Life, a family bakery run by Mr. Ocegueda, who tutored them in the mystical tradition of baking. “You knead the dough by hand and all of the tensions and the spirit you are feeling go into the bread,” Mr. Ocegueda said in an interview.

Homeboy Bakery was offered a grant to buy an automatic dough mixer, Mr. Ocegueda said. “But Father Greg said no, it is better to have them knead by hand because we can employ more people.”

The assignment seems anachronistic because Homeboy Bakery, with its gleaming new ovens and storage bins, is now housed in the Fran and Ray Stark Homeboy Industries headquarters, an $8.5 million center built with philanthropic contributions and opened last October.

But Homeboy’s emphasis is on putting gang members to work. “Our most important task is job training,” Father Boyle said in a telephone interview from Italy, where he is on a three-month sabbatical to write a book on Homeboy’s work in reclaiming lives. Indeed, Mr. Ocegueda’s assignment is to double the number of Homeboy bakers to 50 next year. The jobs pay $9 to $10 an hour, with health benefits after the employee is on the job three months. The aim is to introduce gang members to the discipline of work and eventually to graduate them to jobs in the commercial marketplace.

The Homeboy organization conducts thousands of job development interviews every year, with Father Boyle seeing more than 50 people a day. In his current absence, the chief operating officer, Veronica Vargas, is taking on that work. The organization is now compiling a database of all the people who have been helped or treated through the years, said Mona Hobson, director of development.

The organization is also anticipating expansion. The new Homeboy headquarters, a few blocks from Los Angeles City Hall, “gives us a chance to reach out to African-American gangs; our focus is countywide,” Father Boyle said.

The new center has spurred ideas for growth among supervisors of the businesses, some of whom were once troubled youths but not gang members. “I was a tagger,” a graffiti painter, said Rosaliano Mendez, who heads the maintenance business. “I dropped out of school, but I went back and now I’m studying for an associate degree in business.”

Mr. Mendez sees opportunity for expansion in commercial office cleaning. Eric Bennett, who heads the retail operation, said he “met Father Greg when I was in some trouble.” Mr. Bennett said he was hopeful that “we can spread the Homeboy brand in off- campus stores not only in California but across the country.”

Homeboy Industries’ board, whose members are business and professional people, would like to see expansion. “I think the bakery should be bringing in $4 million to $5 million in revenue per year,” said David Adams, the chairman of real estate investment firms in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles and the chief fund-raiser for the new Homeboy headquarters.

At the moment, the bakery is close to signing a big order for bread and pastries from a chain of coffeehouse restaurants and is seeking other big customers.

Ruben Rodriguez, who with his wife, Cristina, heads the silk screen business, also says he believes expansion is possible. A big factor for Mr. Rodriguez, one of the longest-serving Homeboy supervisors — “I met Father Greg at a bad time in my life.” — is that “Father Greg does all the marketing” for Homeboy products and services.

A question for Homeboy Industries, which is common to all small businesses, is whether the company could go on and prosper without its entrepreneurial founder. Father Boyle, 54 and healthy today, survived leukemia six years ago.

“Several years ago, I might have doubted that it could,” said Michael Hennigan, president of the Homeboy directors and founder of a Los Angeles law firm. “But today I think the organization is large enough and talent from the Jesuit order and elsewhere would come forward. The organization will go on and prosper.”

[Via - New York Times]

Why Cracks Are Good For Business

2008-03-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

The Crack Team is a home-service franchise, specializing in concrete crack repairs. Started in 1985 by Mike ‘The Ray Kroc of Crack’ Koder, The Crack Team was developed to address repetitive concerns of homeowners who were faced with the inevitable leaking cracks often found in basements. Koder, a homebuilder for over 30 years, began working with technology that was both a permanent and cost-effective solution to these leaky concerns. His methods were an ideal alternative to the otherwise costly expense of replacement or more in-depth repairs for concrete foundations and other concrete structures.

As Koder’s business grew to more than 1,000 customers a year, he moved forward and developed a line of exclusive crack repair products that are considered to be some of the best in the industry. He also paved the way for others to join the Crack Team by opening franchising opportunities to entrepreneurs in North America who are looking for a niche service company with year-round work availability, repairing basements, garages, sidewalks, and patios. The industry has little competition and the Crack Team franchise offers on-going technical training and support for both the proven system of crack repair, as well as the exclusive line of repair products.

The Crack Team has gained a national reputation as an innovative company with the highest standards for providing excellent customer service. The company mascot, Mr. Happy Crack, proposes the memorable company slogan, “A Dry Crack Is a Happy Crack”, has its own savvy marketing appeal and has spawned a line of successful and instantly recognizable apparel and novelty items which have been featured prominently on television, radio, and in the print media.

The Crack Team franchise opportunity is one of the fastest growing industries available. The company provides time-tested solutions in crack repair. Along with the training and support, The Crack Team also provides lead-generation programs to assist entrepreneurs in acquiring new customers. The exclusive line of products and other accessories are also part of the franchising package opportunity. Territories in North America are established selectively and are protected by the company. The Crack Team participates in industry association and provides access to a network of referrals on a national level.

eBay strike will be non-event

2008-02-18T15:57:00.000-08:00

The strike by eBay sellers that is supposed to start at midnight already looks doomed to failure. Listings on the site are reportedly up 25% following a 20c cheap listing day in the US and a revision of listing fees for US media sellers to reflect those already in place for UK sellers.

To be perfectly honest I’ve never considered serious sellers as likely to strike in the first place, larger sellers have employees and business premises that need paying for and medium sized sellers rely on eBay for their income. The only type of seller that can afford to strike are those that use the site for pin money and don’t rely on it for their income.

Auctionbytes commenting “Is eBay Boycott for real” appear not to be talking to business sellers with their summation “What I’m hearing from sellers is not, can we afford to boycott eBay for a week, but rather, can we afford to continue selling on eBay once these changes roll out?” Quite frankly listing fees are down, final value fees are up, you’ll only pay final value fees if your item sells so setting your prices at a realistic level and making a real profit is the way to go.

For far too long many eBay sellers haven’t considered the real costs of running a business - think about the overheads you’d entail if you ran a high street shop and in comparison eBay fees pale into insignificance. If a seller can’t make a profit on eBay then quite simply you have to question if they could make a profit anywhere?

My predictions for the week ahead are that serious business sellers will carry on listing in greater quantities then ever before, in particular we’ll see a huge increase in listings from media sellers in the US. A few hobby sellers who use eBay for pin money will strike, list elsewhere for a week, and be back listing on eBay by the end of the month.

Alternative auction sites will report huge spikes in listings and a bump in conversion rates, but will fail to quantify hard numbers but report fluffy percentages. (Remember when eBid reported a sales increase of 57% in the UK and 221% in the US they were comparing Christmas sales with the previous June’s!)

Sellers will find that listing on alternative sites simply doesn’t bring in the volume of sales that eBay does. Sellers will happily buy from each other for a week before realising sellers buying from sellers doesn’t make money - more buyers than sellers are needed for a successful marketplace and that’s what eBay has and the other sites don’t.

In two weeks time it’ll all be forgotten and with the fee changes and pending feedback changes and volume discounts kicking in, eBay will have become a better place for all sellers.

Sofia Vassilieva May Be a Keeper

2008-02-18T15:53:00.000-08:00

According to Variety, Sofia may have a new movie credit on her resume soon. The movie “Keeper” which is set to begin production in March has had a major shakeup. Both young actresses originally set to star in the movie about a girl who was conceived to give her sister a chance to fight off her illness have withdrawn. Dakota Fanning is said to have decided that there was no way she’d shave her head to play the sick older sister.

Sofia Vassilieva, who is pretty close to signing on in that role, must not have the same objection. She’d be fantastic in the role and it is probably a smart career move, but I’d sure hate to see all that lovely hair go. Maybe a Medium episode where Ariel gets a new hairdo is coming up? I guess she could also wear a wig on set.

Lindsay Lohan Recreates Marilyn Monroe's "Last Sitting"

2008-02-18T15:33:00.000-08:00

In 1962, photographer Bert Stern shot a series of photos (2,571 in all) of Marilyn Monroe at the Hotel Bel-Air that are collectively known as “The Last Sitting.” The 36-year-old Monroe was in the darkest period of her life, having weathered two recent divorces, gallbladder surgery and sickness during production of the romantic comedy Something’s Got to Give, from which she was fired and rehired. Six weeks after the Stern photo shoot, Monroe died from a barbiturate overdose in her L.A. home.

46 years later, Stern has revisited the series with Lindsay Lohan filling in for Monroe in a NY Magazine shoot that fastidiously replicates the original poses, lighting, and clothing. “It was very similar, déjà vu you might say, like revisiting an old street,” says Stern, who adds that the project arose from his interest in “controversial women,” or “bad girls,” like “Britney, Paris, and Lindsay.”

Lohan, who owns a lot of Monroe “stuff”, including an apartment the doomed starlet once occupied, seems to be in denial about the parallels between her troubles and Monroe’s last days, instead pointing to Heath Ledger’s death as “both prime examples of what this industry can do to someone.”

When asked during a break in the shoot why that fate befalls some and not others (hint, hint), Li Lo “replied with a flicker of annoyance: ‘I don’t know. I’m not them. But I sure as hell wouldn’t let it happen to me.’”

Photo composite of Marilyn Monroe by Bert Stern.

F-35 lightning

2008-02-18T15:32:00.000-08:00

Air Force Lt. Col. James Kromberg, a former Marine aviator, became the first service member to fly the F-35 on Wednesday at Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base, Texas. Kromber is director of operations for the 461st Flight Test Squadron, Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. He served in the Marine Corps from 1987-2003 and has more than 3,200 flight hours on the AV-8B Harrier, T-38, F-15 and F-16. Attached to the F-35 test team since 2005, Kromberg has logged plenty of hours on the Joint Strike Fighter’s simulator. He also helped draft the aircraft’s initial flight manual, test plans and aircrew training procedures. “I have been smiling since arriving at the aircraft this morning and haven’t stopped,” Kromberg said on the day of the flight, according to an Air Force press release.

Kromberg’s initial test flight put the JSF through takeoff, handling qualities maneuvers, engine throttle transients, formation maneuvers with an F-16 and landing. He took off from Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant at 11:54 a.m. Central Time, flew to 6,000 feet and checked handling qualities at a 15-degree angle of attack, the release said. He then climbed to 10,000 and 12,000 feet, assessing the up-and-away flight-control response. Kromberg, whose call sign is “Flipper,” also tested the F-35’s engine performance and formation-flying characteristics. “The aircraft was responsive across all flight regimes,” he said. “The engine thrust response was excellent — accelerating very quickly. The aircraft was very stable during formation flight.” Further flight tests on the F-35 will include envelope expansion, flying qualities evaluations, subsystems testing and initial systems assessments, according to the release. Edwards will host further F-35 flight tests in the spring.

Forget Deval Patrick

2008-02-18T15:29:00.000-08:00

From the Moscow Times:

In an apparent coincidence that has Tatar media outlets abuzz, the Obama slogan "Yes, We Can!" has the same meaning as [Tatarstan President Mintimer] Shaimiyev's favorite catchphrase, which in Tatar is "Bez Buldyrabyz!"

Apparent coincidence, eh? We're dispatching intern Amanda Erickson to Kazan to look into it.

Obama Plagiarism

2008-02-18T15:24:00.000-08:00

The latest media storm surrounding the election are charges from someone in the Clinton camp that Barack Obama stole from speeches of Mass. Gov Deval Patrick. Accusations are flying faster than donuts at a police convention, but what is the truth? Is it plagiarism or not?

Those who are quick to level the charges seem to be trying to equate a political stump speech with a research paper. But they are not equivalent forms of communication. A research paper, by its very nature, has to be original, and any "borrowings" that are not footnoted with the source acknowledged are considered, with good cause, in all of Academia to be plagiarism, and god help anyone, from freshman to doctoral candidate, who gets nailed for doing it. I've spent enough time, both as a student and as a college instructor, in the Groves of Academe to know what I'm talking about.

A political stump speech, to my way of thinking, is less like a research paper and more like a symphony. If you listen to both of them, you'll see they contain the same kind of movements and pacing: adagio, allegro, allegro non tropo, etc. Neither a political stump speech nor a symphony is intended to inform; they are both intended to work at the emotional level.

The inclusion of bits and pieces from other orchestral works has a long and varied history in classical music, to the point where it even has its own name: "Musical quotation". (See also From ancient Greece to John Williams: music has always been the same.)

And that, I submit, is why Obama's use of something said in another political stump speech by his friend Deval Patrick is the political equivalent of musical quotation; it is not "plagiarism".

Beef Recall

2008-02-18T15:21:00.000-08:00

The Nation's largest ever beef recall has just been announced by the government. The problem was that "downers", cattle to ill to move, or walk, are not supposed to enter the food chaing: the biggest worry being BSE. The animals still need to be slaughtered of course, but they should not be sold as fit for human consumption. The plant was doing that, and thus the beef recall.

In late January a video documenting the mistreatment of cattle at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in Chino was released the Humane Society. The media (LAist included) was sensitive enough to leave this video on the rack but that didn't keep government officials from investigating and announcing the largest beef recall -- nearly 150 million pounds -- in U.S. history this weekend.

The video is pretty disturbing, and the beef recall won't be the only outcome: criminal charges are highly likely:

The US Department of Agriculture yesterday ordered that 143 million lb of beef from the slaughterhouse be recalled. Officials estimate that some 37 million lbs of the recalled meat had been heading to schools across America though they fear that most of it will have already been eaten.

The abattoir run by the Hallmark Meat Packing Company, an associate and supplier of Westland Meat Company, which provides meat for America’s National School Lunch Programme, is now the subject of an an animal-abuse investigation.

Ed Schafer, the US Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department had evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle lost the power to walk after passing inspection, violating health regulations.

“Because the cattle did not receive complete and proper inspection, Food Safety and Inspection Service has determined them to be unfit for human food and the company is conducting a recall,” Mr Schafer said in a statement.

Dr Dick Raymond, the department’s undersecretary for food safety, said: “We don’t know how much product is out there right now. We don’t think there is a health hazard, but we do have to take this action.”

The plant was, unfotunately, known as a large supplier to the school meals system:

Officials estimate that about 37 million pounds of the recalled beef went to school programs, but they believe most of the meat probably has already been eaten.

"We don't know how much product is out there right now. We don't think there is a health hazard, but we do have to take this action," said Dr. Dick Raymond, USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety.

It's difficult to make a beef recall from kids who have already eaten it.

Here's the list of all of the products affected by the beef recall:

These products are subject to recall, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., BURRITO FILLING MIX.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., PACKED FOR JACOBELLIES SAUSAGE CO., 74/26 GROUND BEEF.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., RAW GROUND BEEF MEATBALL MIX FOR FURTHER PROCESSING.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., COARSE GROUND BEEF 'FOR COOKING ONLY', FAT: 15%.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., COARSE GROUND BEEF 'FOR COOKING ONLY'.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., COARSE GROUND BEEF TO BE FURTHER PROCESSED INTO COOKED ITEMS, FAT: 15%.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., COARSE GROUND BEEF 85/15.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., COARSE GROUND BEEF 93/7.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., FINE GROUND BEEF 'FOR COOKING ONLY', FAT: 15%.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., FINE GROUND BEEF 'FOR COOKING ONLY'.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., 90 - 10% GROUND BEEF, 3/16 GRIND.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., GROUND BEEF 1 LB. PACKAGE, FAT: 15%.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., GROUND BEEF, FAT: 15%.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., RAW BONELESS BEEF TRIMMINGS, 'FOR COOKING ONLY'.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., RAW BONELESS BEEF, 'FOR COOKING ONLY'.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., BEEF GROUND 50/50% LEAN.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., BEEF GROUND 73/27% LEAN.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., BEEF GROUND 81/19% LEAN.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., BONELESS BEEF 90/10.

• Various weight boxes of WESTLAND MEAT CO., GROUND PORK FOR FURTHER PROCESSING NOT TO EXCEED 30% FAT.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF TRI TIP.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF TOP SIRLOIN BUTT.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF STRIP SIRLOIN.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF RIB EYE LIP-ON.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF PISMO TENDERLOIN.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF O/S SKIRT.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF I/S SKIRT.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF FLANK STEAK.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF BOTTOM SIRLOIN FLAP.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF STRIP LOIN BONE-IN, FURTHER PROCESS 1X1.

• Various weight boxes of PACKED FOR: KING MEAT CO., BEEF EXPORT RIB 2X2, FURTHER PROCESS.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA SELECT, BEEF RIBEYE ROLL LIP-ON.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA CHOICE OR HIGHER, BEEF RIBEYE ROLL LIP-ON.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA SELECT, BEEF PLATE, OUTSIDE SKIRT.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA CHOICE OR HIGHER, BEEF PLATE, OUTSIDE SKIRT.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA SELECT, BEEF PLATE, INSIDE SKIRT.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA CHOICE OR HIGHER, BEEF PLATE, INSIDE SKIRT.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA SELECT, BEEF LOIN, STRIP LOIN, BONELESS.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA CHOICE OR HIGHER, BEEF LOIN, STRIP LOIN, BONELESS.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA SELECT, BEEF LOIN, BOTTOM SIRLOIN BUTT, FLAP, BONELESS.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA CHOICE OR HIGHER, BEEF LOIN, BOTTOM SIRLOIN BUTT, FLAP, BONELESS.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA SELECT, BEEF LOIN, TOP SIRLOIN BUTT, BONELESS.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA CHOICE OR HIGHER, BEEF LOIN, TOP SIRLOIN BUTT, BONELESS.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA SELECT, BEEF LOIN, TENDERLOIN, FULL, SIDE MUSCLE ON, DEFATTED.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA CHOICE OR HIGHER, BEEF LOIN, TENDERLOIN, FULL, SIDE MUSCLE ON, DEFATTED.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA SELECT, BEEF FLANK STEAK.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA CHOICE OR HIGHER, BEEF FLANK STEAK.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA SELECT, BEEF, BOTTOM SIRLOIN BUTT TRITIP BONELESS.

• Various weight boxes of REGAL brand USDA CHOICE OR HIGHER, BEEF, BOTTOM SIRLOIN BUTT TRI TIP BONELESS.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF LIVERS.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF FEET.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF TRIPE.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF REGULAR TRIPE.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF HONEYCOMB TRIPE.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF TAILS.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF CHEEK MEAT.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF TONGUES.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF TONGUE TRIMMINGS.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF BONELESS.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF RIBS.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF HEARTS.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF CHEEKS.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF PLATES.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF SMALL INTESTINES.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF LIPS.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF SPLEENS.

• Various weight boxes of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF SALIVARY GLANDS, LYMPH NODES AND FAT [TONGUES].

• Six-gallon containers of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF BILE.

• One- and six-gallon containers of HALLMARK MEAT PACKING BEEF BLOOD, .2% SODIUM CITRATE ADDED.

Lindsay Lohan New York Magazine

2008-02-18T15:17:00.000-08:00

Here we go Lindsay Lohan atempted to channel sex appeal of the most famous girl Marilyn Monroe in a photoshoot for New York Magazine.

She did a shoot with his good looking younger sister, such a really good role model.

Lindsay had no problem stripping as Monroe that did the same pose around 50 years ago.

Check the pictures of Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe below:

Ron Lester..Yes That “Ron Lester”

2008-02-18T15:10:00.000-08:00

Remember varsity blues actor Ron Lester the heavy lineman named Billy Bob in the movie ‘Varsity Blues”?

Well that Ron Lester loses weight, yes that varsity blues actor loses 315 pounds.

Had nothing to do with being a varsity blues actor or being in varsity blues, ron lester’s weight loss is nothing short of a miracle! er….of hard work.

Check out the photos...

BEFORE:

AFTER...

Congratulations Ron!!!

Norad Santa Tracker integrates with Google Maps

2007-12-24T14:48:00.000-08:00

Why “A loquacious Antartic fowl entered a libations establishment…” doesn’t pack the same punch as “A penguin walks into a bar…”

2007-12-02T16:01:00.000-08:00

Never confuse “smart sounding speech” with real communication. “A loquacious Antartic fowl entered a libations establishment…” doesn’t pack the same punch as “A penguin walks into a bar…” when you’re telling a joke.

And the guy who wins the debate will always be the one who connects with the audience in the most fundamental, feisty way. Facts won’t win, carefully constructed diatribes won’t win, and even being right won’t win.

Nope.

The winner will always be the dude who cracks the crowd up, and delights their ear with unexpected language.

Thus, I have never offered a plain old seminar before. Instead, I host “Copywriting Sweatshops” and “License To Steal Workshops” (where I teach you how to literally rip-off my best ads for your own nefarious use).

There is real pleasure in a well-turned phrase. All the top writers and marketers I know are constantly on the look-out for cool, off-beat, riveting word play we can use in our copy.

But it’s also important to give credit where it’s due. People rip me off all the time, and it rankles me most when they claim they made up original phrases I’ve penned.

Karma usually takes care of the little thieving bastards (I love how that works)… but it is also important for me not to take credit for phrases that aren’t originally mine.

There are plenty of words to go around… excellent words, too, combined in unique and startling ways… so there’s no need to ever get greedy.

I tell you all this because, for a few hours last week, I thought I’d hit the motherlode of invented phrases while talking with my pal Rich Schefren. I mis-heard him at one point, and thought he’d said “fraudcasting” when he actually said “broadcasting”. (It was late, he’d been up for days putting the finish on his latest manifesto, and he was starting to slur.)

What a great word! It is rare when you come up with a slight change in the original phrase like that, to arrive at something so obviously and clearly askew… and so powerfully charged with shock value.

Alas, it’s not mine to claim.

A quick Google search brought up multiple references for “fraudcasting” (and yeah, some dude has the URL, though he doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with it).

Still, though… it seems not to have slithered into common useage yet.

And yet, it should.

Because fraudcasting is out there. And it’s nasty.

I’m referring to the increasing number of Big Damn Corporations engaging in actual fraudulent activity online.

Let’s be clear here: My trusty beat-to-shit Webster’s dictionary defines “fraud” as “the intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or surrender a legal right”.

Bar room translation: The Man wants to cheat you out of money by gaining your trust… and then shitting on it.

Sorry for the harsh wording there… but that’s what’s going on.

And it’s poisoning the Web for all of the decent entrepreneurs and small biz owners out there.

Here’s the story: It’s no secret that The Man loathes the freedom and easy democratic access of the Web. He prefers a non-level playing field, like television, where he wins just because he has more money than you.

And boy, is The Man ever pissed off that guys like you and me can just throw up a blog and get heavy readership… and more attention than he can with all his expensive commericials and sponsorships. (Well, the opportunity to get more attention is there, if you’re smart, anyway. And that’s enough to get The Man all itchy and upset.)

Every so often, some corportate honcho will get a brainstorm like: “Hey! Let’s just make up our OWN damn blog… and cash in on this stupid Web thing-a-mah-hootie by duping people into believing we’re just like them, only we’ll really SELL them shit! Get me the Creative Department…”

The evidence: Sony did a fake blog, using repulsive phony rappers to stir up cravings for their new versioin of Playstation.

Wal-Mart heavily pushed a completely fictional blog by completely fictional RV folks touting the beneficent wonders of Wal-Marts everywhere. (”Please let these marvelous big box stores into your community! Only good things will happen, we swear!”)

McDonalds even floated a bullshit blog, until they got busted.

And that’s the punch line, really. They ALL got busted… because The Man doesn’t even begin to understand the new order of things online.

Real bloggers have real power. And they’re not amused by cynical attempts to take advantage of this wonderous new tool we all share on the Web.

Right now, regular old bloggers are doing the fact-checking and investigative journalism that the professional journalists are ignoring. And this is changing the game on multiple levels.

Word spreads fast. YouTube has become a judge/trial/jury wasteland for phonies — just ask AOL (who refused to let a dude cancel his account), Jet Blue (videoed lying to passengers during interminable waits on the tarmac), Dell and other corporations stung by the new online Robin Hoods out there shuttling their grievances past all the usual (and “Man-controlled”) paths for complaining, straight to the huddled masses yearning to be set free of bullshit.

Fraudcasting. It’s like broadcasting, except you’re lying like a rug.

And, for now, chances are good you’ll get busted if you try it.

But do NOT be lulled into thinking this is the way it will always be. This “truth will out” environment is absolutely unique in human history. Throughout the long trudge toward the freedom we now enjoy, MOST of your ancestors who have spoken out against The Man were promptly crushed like bugs.

And in MOST of the world today, that’s still the case.

Get straight on this.

The reason Google — for example — has permanently soiled its reputation is because they folded up their principles of privacy and freedom when dealing with China… and people are in jail because of it. They went for the easy cash, and people got hurt.

You cannot take any freedom for granted. When you do, The Man will pounce and strip it away from you.

And if you think it can’t happen here, you’re delusional.

There is NO guarantee the Web will continue to be as unregulated and free as it is today. Remember — it doesn’t run on magic, but on very real networks that can easily be hijacked by the Powers That Be, and subjugated completely.

Many of the fraudcasting episodes of corporations were exposed not by mainstream media, but by regular dudes who cared deeply about truth.

But we’re relying on the utter cluelessness of The Man in most of these cases. Politicians routinely get caught with email they thought they’d “deleted” (cuz they can’t get their brains around the idea of “deletion” not being permanent) that ruin thier careers. Corporate beasts get busted because they treat blogging like some stupid, irrelevant geekoid hobby.

They don’t get it. Yet.

But they soon will.

(Side note: With just a touch of self-abusing irony, Big Biz could get the results they seek — a little good PR, some thumbs-up word-of-mouth buzz, even sales. I don’t know if Jack In The Box has a blog, but if he does, I’ll bet it’s funny, ironic and readable. And isn’t trying to fool or defraud anyone.)

Anyway, that’s the larger picture.

For entrepreneurs and small biz owners, it’s important to understand how blogs can fit into a real marketing model.

First rule: Don’t bullshit your readers.

The Web is crawling with scams and lies and nonsense (both small-time and corporate)… and that’s an opening for smart marketers.

BE that guy who tells the truth, and EARNS the trust of your readers, every time you post.

The Web is entertaining… it’s informative… and it’s a snakepit of propoganda and fraud.

Getting the attention of people interested in what you offer is the hardest part of your gig. Holding onto that attention is your main job.

It’s okay to sell stuff online. That’s how the economy works.

But pulling a “Blair Witch” kind of trick is risky, because people are getting paranoid and touchy about the increasing amount of fraudcasting out there. It’s neither unique nor amusing anymore.

When the noise of the market reaches ear-splitting levels, you’ll gain more listeners if you speak softly and tell the truth, as simply and eloquently as possible.

Stay frosty,

John Carlton
www.marketingrebel.com

The Power Of Negative Keywords

2007-12-02T16:00:00.000-08:00

Today, a tale of two clients and their Negative Keywords. A story of success and failure, and the reason why....

Client #1:
Terrence spends $70,000 a month on AdWords (quite profitably, I might add) and one day last month his webmaster printed out the web stats that show all the different searches that actually brought people to his website.

He spent some time combing through the list and made a huge list of negative keywords.The next month his sales stayed exactly the same and his spend dropped to $40,000 a month. 40% down, overnight.

Hey, it doesn't matter whether you're spending $70,000 or just $70 per month, a 40% cost reduction is a big deal! This guy was already dominating his market... and now he's unstoppable.

Client #2:
William spends $9,000 a month on AdWords, also quite profitably, thank you very much. He did pretty much the same thing - a big exhaustive list of negative keywords - and he dropped his spend down to $6,000.

But his sales dropped even MORE than that. 33% cost savings, and maybe 40% dent in sales. Oops... better get rid of those negative keywords.

OK.... so what was going on?

Here's the difference: Terrence, who saved a ton of dough, identified a number of completely different itches that people want to scratch, with very similar keywords. Identify the negative keywords because THOSE people ain't NEVER gonna buy.

William's product has very broad appeal in a market where potential buyers could come from almost anywhere. They could even come from outside the niche and still be interested. William needs to buy as much traffic as he can reasonably get and not really worry too much about the negative keywords - actually only a few.

Situations where negative keywords stop wasted clicks - very common. Everybody should have negative keywords. Situations where negative keywords hurt - less common. But it happens. When you make major changes, pay close attention and be ready to back off if the strategy isn't working.

To your success, Perry Marshall

Joe Sugarman's Triggers - Airplane Tail Collecting Made Easy

2007-12-02T15:58:00.000-08:00

In direct marketing, there are products classified as collectibles. Stamps, plates, dolls, and coins are but a few that have been offered by direct marketers in the past, and it is a very healthy and robust market niche. It’s pretty easy to understand that an emotional urge exists to collect many of these items. But what you might be surprised to learn is that collecting is also true in practically every business.

Take my experience with a mail order watch buyer. An enthusiastic watch buyer is your perfect prospect for another watch. When I was selling watches in my catalog, I would periodically send mailings to customers who had previously ordered other products from me. I also mailed to my customers who had ordered watches.

My best list for watches consisted of my existing watch owners. Now you might think, if you had a watch, what would you need another one for? Wrong. Many people actually collect them. They’ll have several watches, several pairs of sunglasses, several pairs of jeans, a library of videos or compact disks, and even a dozen Hawaiian shirts. The list is endless.

I’m always amazed at the number of dolls collected by QVC viewers. Some of their viewers are older women, long past childhood, yet among QVC’s most avid collectors. And they have dozens of dolls. Small car models are also sold on QVC. They are some of the most popular products for men. And not to be outdone, there must be thousands of viewers who own many BluBlocker sunglasses—some in several different styles.

The point is, when selling (whether in print, on TV, or in a personal selling situation),
recognize that there is a very large segment of the population who, for whatever reason, has an emotional need to collect a series of similar products. These products bring great joy and satisfaction and in some cases utility.

Think about those who collect real cars. Many who can afford them have collections that range up to hundreds of full-sized automobiles. What kind of emotional need are they fulfilling?

One of the ways the direct marketers optimize sales via the collecting instinct is by first sending, free of charge with the very first shipment, some sort of device to hold the collection.

I can remember ordering silver airplane tails with various airline logos embossed on them from the Franklin Mint, a successful direct mail company that specialized in collectibles. I started collecting them to see how the Franklin Mint conducted its program rather than from any emotional interest in collecting airplane tails.

Each one of the flat, eighth-inch-thick tails was made of pure silver, giving it value. The tails consisted of the vertical tail element, the part where the airline logo and symbol are located.

And each of the logos was engraved into the silver tail. They were only a few inches wide, weighed about an ounce, and by virtue of just their silver content, they were obviously valuable.

I received a beautiful four-drawer hand-crafted walnut chest with cutouts for each of the silver tails. The chest was so expensive-looking that I felt a subconscious sense of guilt. I had to do something in return to show my appreciation to the Franklin Mint for sending it to me. Something like filling it up with airplane tails.

Now I realize that you might think I’m exaggerating but in truth, these were some of the emotions I felt when I received the chest. Then another emotion came over me. The chest had all these cutouts in which you placed the tails. I had this overwhelming anticipation of wanting to fill up each of the cutouts. Kinda like when I was a little kid and put round pegs in round holes. We’re talking some very basic early childhood stuff here.

And those tails indeed came once a month. I remember the thrill of seeing the Franklin Mint’s envelope arrive each month and my anticipation in opening the envelope to discover what airline’s tail I had received. After opening the envelope and placing the tail in my hand-crafted walnut chest, I saw I was getting closer to filling up the slots. First filling up the first drawer. Then I started the second drawer. I looked at my collection each time I put in a new tail and felt the pride of knowing that my tail collection was growing. That indeed I was accomplishing something that was not that hard to do, something I didn’t have to really work hard to accomplish, but showed that I had real consistency in my life, like that scientific and psychological stuff I talked about in Chapter 1.

Finally, I had enough tails in my chest that when guests visited in my home, I could show them my collection which was now in a prominent position in my living room. I had achieved a level of self-actualization, of self-esteem, and of accomplishment that I had not felt before.

I finally sobered up and stopped collecting. It was costing me a fortune and after all, the only reason I started was for the research—to personally feel the emotional reasons why people get sucked into these schemes. And the collection was kind of silly to start with. The airlines were either merging, going out of business, or changing their names so fast that even the Franklin Mint couldn’t keep up.

But this experience convinced me that there were lots of opportunities in the sales process for selling products to people who would not normally be considered collectors. I found that there were even people who collected gadgets or everything I offered, for that matter. To these people it was like I was their drug supplier. They couldn’t get enough of my products.

Just because you have sold a customer a product, don’t ignore the opportunity to sell him the same product again or a new variation of that product. Just as I found out that my best watch customers were the ones who already owned watches, you might find that your best prospects are the ones who are already your customers and own an almost identical product. They often represent a powerful and overlooked market.

A printer might like to collect printing presses; a gardener might like to collect garden tools; an architect might like to collect unusual drafting tools. You name the category and there will probably be some large percentage of prospects in that group who have the motivation to collect whatever you are offering. This is often associated with consistency, as I outlined in Chapter 1. Once you have set a buying pattern, it is easy and comforting to be consistent in your future buying activity.

The desire to collect extends beyond the obvious collectible products. If you’ve sold your customer a product, consider the fact that the customer might also like to collect similar products. I wonder if there is a market for old airplane tails?
Trigger 18: Desire to Collect

[Via - Triggers]

AdSense Niches - Refurbished Laptops And Home Business

2007-12-02T15:57:00.000-08:00

$0.40-$0.65

Refurbished laptops.

Did you know that margins on refurbished laptops are a lot higher than on new ones. Every time a shop or a website sells you a laptop, they make 50-100
dollar profit. Even on notebooks that cost $3000. Refurbished laptops, on the other hand, are 30% profit. I’ve never been able to make the laptop niche
work for me due to have MFA and traffic arbitrage activity, but refurbished laptops are making some major bucks for me right now. I also find that
“refurbished laptops” work better than “used laptops” for AdSense.

$0.55-$0.80

Work At Home, Homebusiness

I don’t think that this is a very ethical niche, since almost all ads that run on my sites that deal with “work at home” and “homebusiness” issues are
either 100% scams or near scams or MLMish bizopps that work by “now you find another idiot like to pay for this and get commission”. But the bids are high.

Why MBA Degree Is A Waste Of Time

2007-12-02T15:54:00.000-08:00

Most people who knew Gabriel Hammond at Johns Hopkins in the late 1990s could have predicted he would rise quickly on Wall Street. As a freshman, he traded stocks from his dorm room, making a $1,000 bet on Caterpillar. Soon after, he abandoned his childhood dream of becoming a lawyer and, upon graduation, joined Goldman Sachs as a stock analyst.

Three years into his new job, Mr. Hammond noticed something. Very few of his young co-workers were taking a hiatus from Wall Street to go to business school, long considered an essential rung on the way to the top of the corporate ladder.

So he, too, decided to forgo an M.B.A.. Instead, he raised $5 million and started his own hedge fund, Alerian Capital Management, in 2004. The fund now manages $300 million out of offices in New York and Dallas, and Mr. Hammond, 28, enjoys seven-figure payouts.

Like other young people on the fast track, Mr. Hammond has run the numbers and figures that an M.B.A. is a waste of money and time — time that could be spent making money. “There’s no way that I would consider it,” he says.

As more Americans have become abundantly wealthy, young people are recalculating old assumptions about success. The flood of money into private equity and hedge funds over the last decade has made billionaires out of people like Kenneth Griffin, 38, chief executive of the Citadel Investment Group, and Eddie Lampert, 45, the hedge fund king who bought Sears and Kmart. These men are icons for the fast buck set — particularly the mathematically gifted cohort of rising stars known as “quants.” Many college graduates who are bright enough to be top computer scientists or medical researchers are becoming traders instead, and they measure their status in dollars instead of titles.

Many of the brightest don’t covet a corner office at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. Instead, they’re happy to work at a little-known hedge fund run out of a two-room office in Greenwich, Conn., as long as they get a fat payday. The competition from alternative investment firms — private equity and hedge funds in particular — is driving up salaries of entry-level analysts at much larger banks. And top performers at the banks make so much money today that they don’t want to take two years off for business school, even if it’s a prestigious institution like the Wharton School or Harvard.

The new ranks of traders and high-octane number crunchers on Wall Street are also a breed apart from celebrated long-term investors like Warren E. Buffett and investment banking gurus like Felix G. Rohatyn. What sets the new crowd apart is the need for speed and a thirst for instant riches.

“With the growth of hedge funds, you’re getting a lot of really smart people who are getting paid a lot very young,” says Arjuna Rajasingham, 29, an analyst and a trader at a hedge fund in London. “I know it’s a bit of a short-term view, but it’s hard to walk away from something that’s going really well.”

The shift has not gone unnoticed by administrators at some business schools. Richard Schmalensee, who was dean of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management until June, chalked it up to the changing nature of money-making. In many banks and investment boutiques, traders with math and science backgrounds now contribute more to the bottom line than the white-shoed investment bankers who long presided over Wall Street. And traders tend to be less likely to go to business school.

“I don’t think you will see M.B.A.’s less represented in executive suites, but you may see M.B.A.’s less represented in the lists of the world’s richest people,” Professor Schmalensee says.

BUSINESS school has not fallen out of favor among the student population at large. The number of students who earned M.B.A.’s in 2005 was about 142,600, nearly twice the level in 1991. But as M.B.A.’s become more common, the degree seems to carry less prestige with people who land top-paying jobs in finance soon after college.

And recent upheavals in the financial markets don’t seem to be changing the thinking of these younger high-fliers and their employers.

Hedge fund managers are unlikely to punish their younger workers for any dip in returns this year, says Adam Zoia, managing partner at Glocap, a headhunter in New York. Management fees charged by funds — typically 2 percent — come in regardless of return levels and can more than cover large salaries for young employees at many funds.

“Most managers say, ‘If I don’t pony up a decent bonus, then I’m going to lose people,’ ” Mr. Zoia says. “It’d be short-sighted of them not to retain their good people.”

At funds that manage $1 billion to $3 billion, people with just a few years of finance experience will make $337,000 this year, Mr. Zoia says, and those with five to nine years of experience will average $830,000, up 6 percent from last year. These estimates include analysts and researchers but not portfolio traders, who can make much more because they sometimes share in profits.

Dozens of young people (mostly male) who want to be, or already are, successful traders said in interviews that they relished the challenge of their jobs, in addition to the lofty paychecks.

But they also spoke as if a money-clock were ticking: many said they wanted to make as much money as fast as they could so that they could live in style later in life while doing less lucrative things like running a charity, working for the government, spending time with their families, or inventing new technologies. Some, of course, plan to stay in finance their entire careers, and they, too, are very focused on earning fat bonuses fast.

“The sales pitch of these private equity funds or these hedge funds is, ‘Come here, and you’ll make a million bucks in two years,’ ” says Gregg R. Lemkau, 38, managing director and chief operating officer of investment banking at Goldman Sachs, who passed up business school to stay at Goldman in the early 1990s when that choice was more rare.

And because today there are more self-made millionaires — and billionaires — than ever before, 20-something traders seem bolder in their monetary ambitions. Business school often does not fit into these plans.

“If you want to make the most money in the shortest period of time, you can’t be away from work for two years,” says Vitaly Dukhon, 30, who recently left the Fortress Investment Group in New York to join another hedge fund.

While in college at Harvard, Mr. Dukhon thought he would go to business school in his mid-20s, but in his first job on the Treasury desk at Deutsche Bank, he realized that the smartest people just a few years his senior were staying put. “I saw that people that had been working for 20 years did have M.B.A.’s, but people five to six years older than me were not going,” he says. “Going to business school is a way for people to try to open the door, to try to get into a company or hedge fund. But if you’re already there, it doesn’t make sense to go.”

Mr. Hammond of Alerian noticed the same trend while he was an analyst at Goldman Sachs. His co-workers who went to business school either wanted to change careers, or they were not doing well in their current jobs, he says.

Part of the shift comes as investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse have changed their tune on business school. Instead of pushing all their young employees into M.B.A. programs, banks are telling the best ones to stay put.

“We are the perfect training ground for people who want to have careers in finance,” says Caitlin McLaughlin, director of campus recruiting for Citi, the former Citigroup. Just 15 years ago, Ms. McLaughlin estimates, 85 to 90 percent of Citi’s analyst classes ended up attending business school. Now, she thinks that figure is closer to 50 percent.

Samir Ahmad, 25, has worked at Citi since college. This summer, he was promoted to associate, an M.B.A.-level position, in the fixed-income, currencies and commodities division. Despite advice from his older brother that he should attend business school, Mr. Ahmad says he cannot see what he would gain to justify the time. “If I were to spend two years at business school, I’d get an M.B.A. degree, but I think learning a different product or a different group here at Citi would be more valuable,” he says.

To be sure, business school can still be a valuable investment, especially for those who want to change careers. Most schools teach a well-rounded curriculum that exposes students to the full picture of the way the business world works. They are great places to make friends and connections that can help throughout a career. And the top business schools serve as a useful filtering system, placing a seal of approval on graduates that can help them find jobs.

“Most banking — and that includes private equity — is about deals and about relationships,” says Timothy Butler, director of M.B.A. career development programs at Harvard Business School. “That will always be M.B.A. territory.”

YET even some students at top schools like Harvard say the decision to go is tougher now than it likely was two decades ago. “We all struggled with it,” says Katie Shaw, 28, who is in her second year of business school there. “It’s not only, ‘Where do I go to business school?’ It’s also, ‘Do I go?’ ”

Ms. Shaw worked in private equity before business school and plans to return to a position in finance. In private equity, she says, an M.B.A. is valued because buying and selling companies involves relationships and company analysis skills. Still, most private equity firms used to require their young hires to leave to go to business school, and some are now letting talented ones keep working instead.

Headhunters for hedge funds and private equity firms say hedge funds, in particular, do not value an M.B.A. “I have some clients that will legitimately say, ‘An M.B.A. means absolutely nothing to us,’ ” says Tim Zack, principal of In-Site Search, a headhunting firm in Westport, Conn., that is a division of Chaves and Associates.

Mr. Hammond of the Alerian hedge fund recently hired someone from Carnegie Mellon’s business school because of that person’s engineering talent, not the skills he learned in business school. While Mr. Hammond says he understands why his new employee went to business school to move into finance, he would look less favorably on someone in an M.B.A. program who had left finance to go to business school.

If he were looking at someone who went to Harvard Business School after the two-year analyst program at Goldman, “I’d be suspicious,” he says. “I’d be saying, ‘What was it you were doing wrong that you couldn’t get a promotion at Goldman or did not pursue an opportunity with a private equity or hedge fund?’ ”

When young people on Wall Street consider the benefits of business school, Mr. Hammond says, the upside no longer outweighs lost salaries and bonuses they would have earned. He calculates the cost of going to a two-year business school to be at least half a million dollars for the average bank employee — $250,000 or more each year in lost salary, plus $50,000 a year in tuition and living expenses. For hedge fund employees, Mr. Hammond says, the number would be considerably higher.

The result, headhunters say, is that many of the best people in finance are no longer entering the M.B.A. pipeline. “If someone is doing well at a hedge fund, they absolutely do not encourage their employees to go off to business school,” says Mr. Zoia of Glocap.

Some young people are pursuing alternatives that can be completed without leaving their jobs. Some take the certified financial adviser tests or study part-time at night at schools like N.Y.U. that offer master’s degrees in subjects like financial engineering.

“There’s a real shift in assumptions as to what is going to make you a better applicant or a prospect for a job,” says Art Hogan, chief market analyst for Jefferies & Company, noting that he had seen an increased interest in young people pursuing a degree as a certified financial adviser at night rather than leaving their jobs for an M.B.A.

At the banks, there has been a push in recent years to keep top performers around after their time as analysts, the most junior position, ends. “Strong performers we want to keep at the firm for as long as possible,” says Julie Kalish, 28, head of United States recruiting for Credit Suisse. “The amount of analysts that we try to keep for the associate promotion process has grown over recent years.”

Admissions officers at top business schools say finance firms always try to hold onto their best employees when the economy is good. They say interest from applicants working in finance is not declining and their graduates still land a large number of top finance jobs. What administrators at business schools do not know — largely because their admissions and career placement offices are separate — is whether their students with a finance background are staying in that industry.

Recruiters at banks say a large number of the students that they are hiring from business schools are from an international background or are changing careers. These students are valuable, they say, but they come in with a different background from someone who has been in finance since age 22.

Jeffrey Talpins, chief investment officer at Element Capital Management, a small fixed-income hedge fund in New York, says he likes to hire people fresh out of school so he can teach them himself. Mr. Talpins attended Yale as an undergraduate but did not go to business school. If a young employee asked his advice on business school, he says, he would tell them not to go if they wanted to stay in finance. “I’d say, ‘You already have a great platform for a job in finance,’ ” he says. “If you’re a superstar, and you’re very good, you’ll grow very rapidly in this field.”

Eventually, these young people may want to raise money and start their own fund, suggests Thomas Caleel, director of admissions at Wharton, and that’s where an M.B.A. and the connections that come with it could help. “If you are trying to raise money for a hedge fund, you will need that network,” he says.

Mr. Talpins of Element said he had no trouble raising money for his hedge fund without an M.B.A. After all, he had a track record from Citi and Goldman Sachs to show to potential investors. In his corner of the world, where math equations are likely to be scrawled on white boards around the office and young people hold the purse strings to millions of dollars in investor money, it seems there is no point in going to business school just to punch a ticket.

In 2005, Trader Monthly named Mr. Talpins one of the top 30 traders under 30. “Youth is not wasted on this crop, any of whom could be a billionaire by 40,” the magazine said. “Or, then again, they could be belly up and bust.”

Mr. Hammond of Alerian, who was featured on the magazine’s list last year, said he has seen people go to hedge funds and get fired in six months “because they couldn’t hack it.”

But he says the risk is worth it.

“If you look at the really successful hedge fund managers — the Eddie Lamperts,” he says, “they’re all in their 40s now. They were probably making only low single-digit millions in their 20s.

“That’s why you do this,” he continues. “That’s why it’s so attractive, because the payoff of being the winner, the next Eddie Lampert, is so high.”

[Via - Simply Put, Smart People Don't Need An MBA]

The Common Link Between A Copywriter And A Mafia Boss

2007-12-02T15:51:00.000-08:00

One of the “forum rats”, as we affectionately refer to each other, posted the question that is on the mind of most business owners’ when they first encounter the concept of “learning” to write their own copy.

Essentially, that question is this: “Really, why should I bother to learn the skills of writing copy at all?

When you look around at the mega-wealthy, they OWN things and manage from the top.

Like a crime boss. They want someone hit, they send out Guido.

Hard to imagine Donald Trump chewing a pencil, coming up with a dozen new headlines.

So… why bother to learn copy, if your dreams are big? Wouldn’t that time be better spent playing Monopoly-style biz boss, amassing property and holdings and moving and shaking?

And just hire the best writers to do your copywriting work?”

And here is my answer:

You ask a very good question. It’s so good, in fact, that it mimics exactly how I’ve been postioning my copywriting course lately in seminars.

My general message is this: Sure, you can (and probably will, in some cases) end up hiring writers to do the bulk of the writing for you as you grow your biz.

However, just as a crime boss hires hit men to do the dirty work… chances are, the boss still knows HOW to do the hit himself… and probably spent mucho time in his “rise to power” days actually doing just that. (Very Shakespearean, these modern crime lords.)

Same with biz.

ALL the top multi-millionaire marketers I know — from Jay Abraham to Dan Kennedy, from Eben Pagan to Frank Kern, from Rich Schefren to Mike Filsaime — know how to write killer copy.

And, for the most part, they still handle the important jobs themselves. Even though they may hire out the less-than-critical projects. (Eben — who will gross tens of millions this year — recently spent weeks sequestered, alone, in his home office pounding out copy for his recent launch. Wrote every word himself.)

The reason for this is fundamental: If you don’t know how to write good copy, how will you be able to JUDGE whether whoever you hire has done a good job?

If you are clueless, you’ll be at the mercy of your freelancers. You won’t understand what’s needed, you won’t know if the copy submitted is any good, you won’t be able to set real deadlines… you’re just a babe in the woods, vulnerable and potential lunch for every predator who catches your scent. (And even good, ethical writers will take advantage of you, because it’s so easy. Never forget that the writer/client relationship is inherently hostile – each person wants the best deal for themselves, and wants to do as little work/pay as little money for the process as possible. It’s the nature of the world.)

Just like a crime boss who has no idea how hits happen. The freelance killers he hires (if they know he’s clueless) will jack him around, take forever, botch the job, etc. It’s the stuff that built the Sopranos lore. Remember: Tony did his own hits, when he wanted it done right. (Like offing his cousin.)

There is NO other skill in biz more important than writing copy.

Period.

Show me a CEO who doesn’t understand advertising (which is built around the copy), and I’ll show you a screw-up about to tank the stock. He may get the recognition, but he’s utterly dependent on whoever he has doing the actual marketing… and his entire existence rests on the competence/incompetence of that hired dude behind the scenes.

Shudders all around. Sleepless nights. Ulcers and early death.

But hey — he didn’t “waste” any valuable time learning how to write copy.

Same with politics. The guys who rock as politicians write most or all of their own speeches. The hacks hire it out, oblivious of how embarrassing and exposed they become when their ghost writers put the wrong words in their mouths. (Plus, they get that “deer in the headlights” look whenever they face the press without a script.)

You ever see an actor on his own in an interview? Fielding tough, unexpected questions, they reveal that they are not even close to being as witty, or charming, or smart as the characters they play.

The power of writing has never been proven more important than the way network and cable television has nearly shut down entirely due to the current writer’s strike. Leno, Letterman, Stewart, Colbert, et al, are funny dudes… but they rely on writers to provide the bulk of their show’s wit. (Slight twist here: All those guys COULD write their own stuff, if they had the time, though. They are all seething bastards when it comes to judging the quality of their hired writers, because they know what they want. Thus, they produce high-end shows that rock. But pay attention: During free-form interviews, they are on their own, and they’re “writing” their own witty, funny stuff AS THEY TALK. This, too, is writing copy, even though there’s no typing involved. When you understand HOW to write what you need, you eventually get good enough to write it in your head as you talk. You become a living, breathing copy-producing monster.)

No copy, no action. It really is that simple.

Operation MoneySuck demands that you spend your precious (and very limited) time honing your most important chops. And yes, amassing the outside fortifications of larger and more efficient businesses is important… but they will crumble without the foundational support of killer copy. (All the largest mailers in the world — Rodale, Phillips, Agora — were started by people who understood and wrote copy. Some have stumbled along the way, whenever non-writers gained control and lost sight of basic salesmanship. Great lesson there.)

Copy is salesmanship-in-print. Selling is what you do. The largest and most efficient business is just an empty shell if it cannot sell what it produces.

Learn the craft.

Stay frosty.

[via - John Carlton www.carltoncoaching.com]

P.S. One last point: The idea that you can just hire the “best” writers to do your copy has a big hole in it.

Why?

Because, the “A List” of top writers is only around two-dozen names long. And they are all pretty much booked through eternity. No amount of moolah can get them to write for you, until you start offering partner-sized equity in your biz.

The “B List” of writers are also booked solid, most of the time. If you intend to pay for your most important copy, you may as well hook up an umbilical cord from the writer to your bank account… because you’re gonna pay a LOT (even if you can’t find an “A List” writer to do your job).

Worse — there’s a mob of untested, unproven, and weak-skilled freelancers out there masquerading as grizzled professionals… charging huge bucks to write lame-ass copy.

So you can’t tell from their fees how good they are.

You can shell out gold for peanuts… unless you know how to judge good copy.

The only way to do that: Learn the craft.

Don’t make me come down there…

How To Make $1,200 A Month From A Blog With 250 Readers

2007-12-02T15:47:00.000-08:00

Angie Mecklenburg, a mother of four in Sutter, Ill., blogs about chickens, God, and her farm. For an estimated $15, she'll write about soy-wax candles for a marketer.

Over the last 18 months, Mecklenburg has kept up three blogs, the most popular being Ang's Chicken Coop, which has the tagline "a view of the world from the coop." With about 250 daily visitors to her sites, she said she manages to make as much as $1,200 a month, collecting fees from Google advertising and marketers who pay her to write about their products via the blog ad network iZea.

For example, iZea recently paid her about $15 to write about candles from the Maddison Avenue Candles Company. She also was paid to write a blog about the Christian movie The Last Sin Eater earlier this year.

"iZea sent me a synopsis and movie clip. I blogged it and then I went and saw it," Mecklenburg said at the BlogWorld conference and expo here, a three-day event for blog entrepreneurs and professionals. She said she loved the movie.

Mecklenburg's story is just one of many here this week at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is also playing host to GodblogCon, a gathering of religious bloggers. Many of the attendees are trying to figure out how to make money from their small publishing ventures, whether it's a political, military, or God-related blog.

iZea, formerly called Pay for Post, is one company trying to capitalize on that desire. Founded in June 2006, the company pays as many as 85,000 bloggers to write about a range of products, including household products, cars, wireless phones, and new movies. According to Randy Mountz, vice president of sales, iZea has roughly 11,000 advertisers in its network, including Hewlett-Packard, Ford, and MGM.

Mountz said the company pays bloggers an average of $18 for a 200-word post on a product or service. Its top blogger, the Florida mom behind Simplekindoflife.com, has made as much as $18,000 over the last year, he said.

Still, the company has had some push-back from other bloggers for buying blog editorial, he said. That's why, "we strongly encourage full disclosure in the post of the sponsorship," he said.

And so far, that's working for Mecklenburg, who now has as many as six blogs to discuss her different interests. Those sites include Twitter-patted.com and Ang's Brood.

"I blog about God and the things I see he does in my life," she said. "But it's not my sole focus. I have many interests and it's really hard to wrap all of them in one blog."

[Via - CNET]

Success Story

2007-12-02T15:41:00.000-08:00

Eric Royal Lybeck, a former smoker, once told his friend and 13-year band mate, Henry Rich, 27, that he was going on a smoke break to feed his "oral fixation." Rich thought it was an excellent name for a mint company--and Oral Fixation was born in 2003. While still playing in their band, Rich and Royal, the pair researched mint production and decided to sell high-end mints in fashionable tins to upscale outlets like The Ritz Carlton, W Hotels, specialty food stores and coffeehouses, as well as online at oralfix.com.

Merging their band's touring schedule with their $5 million business's growing needs, Rich and Lybeck, 26, schedule tour dates in the same cities as major trade shows. "We do business in 15 to 20 countries at any given time, so it's really important for me to come and meet with distributors and just communicate the brand message to them," says Rich. Still, it helps to know that when Rich is hobnobbing with distributors overseas, his superb staff of five in Oral Fixation's Hopewell, New Jersey, office is at the helm.

[via - Entrepreneur]

With 100 Million Dollars In Annual Sales, Life Really Is Good

2007-12-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

Even though he broke his foot dancing at his brother’s wedding one recent weekend, life is still good for Bert Jacobs.

Mr. Jacobs is the 42-year-old co-founder of Life is good, a popular apparel brand based in Boston that is on track to break $100 million in sales this year. This is rarefied air for Mr. Jacobs, who a dozen years ago was selling T-shirts out of a battered van on the streets of Boston with his brother John, now 39.

From a single childlike drawing of a character they named Jake and their uplifting three-word slogan, the brothers have developed a fashion brand sold in 4,500 independent retail outlets in the United States and 27 other countries.

Since 1994, they have sold nearly 20 million Life is good T-shirts and now have a product line with more than 900 items, from hats to dog beds, and the company continues to grow 30 to 40 percent annually. There are now 93 independently owned Life is good retail shops selling only their merchandise, and the company plans to have a total of 200 by the end of 2009. With all that, Life is good has just 250 employees.

Life is good, which rations its use of capital letters, offers one more example of a small company creating a big brand. Though most consumers associate great brands with marketing giants like Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Apple and Nike, the ability to build a powerful brand is no longer reserved for the big spenders. Small companies with great ideas and well-planned strategies — Kryptonite bicycle locks, Stonyfield Farm yogurt, Zipcar — have spawned prominent brands.

“A big brand comes from big insights about culture and consumers and what it is that they need,” said Susan Fournier, a brand expert and associate professor of marketing at the School of Management at Boston University. “To me, that has nothing to do with big budgets.”

“Life is good tapped into an emotional ethos that struck a chord with where the culture was at a certain point in time. That is not done by a marketing budget but by their customers who become evangelists and give the brand visibility and credibility.”

Internet start-ups like Google, YouTube, Craigslist and Facebook used the Web to promote themselves and have now grown into giants themselves. Facebook, the popular social networking Web site, for example, was started in a Harvard dormitory room by three undergraduates less than four years ago, and today, with just over 300 employees, has nearly 50 million active users and has been signing up 200,000 new ones a day since January. New brands can be started online with stunning speed and efficiency by small groups of entrepreneurs who understand the impact of the viral environment of the Web.

Creating that ubiquity for a brand in the nondigital world is tougher. Though they had been reasonably content to sell enough of their wares to pay a meager rent and avoid taking real jobs, the Jacobs brothers always believed that they could make a better T-shirt and turn it into a bona fide business.

They posted their own drawings and slogans on the wall of their apartment near Boston and regularly polled friends at their frequent keg parties for feedback about their ideas. “It was truly like a focus group,” Bert Jacobs recalled.

In search of something that would resonate with a broad audience, they created Jake, a crudely drawn stick character not all that far removed from the Smiley Face, and were amazed at how he inspired an intensely positive reaction.

“This guy has life figured out,” wrote one friend next to the drawing.

They later posted a list of 50 slogans they had compiled and got a similar reaction to the unremarkable phrase “life is good.” A girlfriend concluded that the slogan with three simple words “kind of says it all.”

The brothers printed 48 test T-shirts that combined the slogan with the drawing for a street fair in Cambridge, Mass., in 1994, and sold the entire lot in 45 minutes.

That night, the brothers huddled and decided that the gold they had seemingly struck was a result of their message of optimism. “The reason people bought those shirts was because they understood it instantly,” Bert Jacobs said. “It made them smile, and it was tangible. They could reach out and get a little sunshine.”

Doug Gladstone, chief executive of Brand Content, an ad agency in Boston, agreed. “They tapped into something positive yet benign,” he said. “The product makes you feel good but it’s not over the top.”

By the end of 1994, the brothers had sold $82,000 of Life is good shirts through a couple of willing retail outlets. Within four years, they broke the $1 million barrier and believed they had found the small business they had always dreamed of and that they were sitting on an emerging brand.

The outside world did not see it that way. “It was a real uphill battle to get other people to say we had a brand,” Bert Jacobs said. “At $10 million and even $20 million in sales, they were still asking us when we were going to launch something different.”

With no business acumen, the brothers sought out successful retailers and peppered them with questions. Bert Jacobs acknowledged that smarter businessmen could have expanded the company more quickly but that was never the point.

Prof. Fournier said that slow growth is an asset for small companies trying to build brands.

“People with deep pockets put the pedal to the metal and do too much too quickly,” she said. “Big companies try to do everything in the first two years but often fall off the cliff. Small companies have to hold back and build the brand more carefully and diligently. Slow and steady often wins the race.”

The Jacobs brothers considered a consumer advertising campaign several years ago but decided to wait until growth slowed to start it. Growth has never slowed. Instead of advertising, the company spends its money on charitable fund-raising festivals for children’s causes.

“People who are facing adversity embrace our message the most,” Bert Jacobs said.

Skeptics have warned the brothers that their concept has a limited shelf life, and, indeed, they plan to extend the brand to try to keep it vibrant. Next spring, Life is good plans to start several apparel and product lines like Good Karma, Good Kids, Good Dog and Good Vibes that will aim at specific audiences. Good Karma, for example, is an environmentally sustainable clothing line. Good Kids will extend the product line for children.

Bert Jacobs is confident the brand has legs. “So much of fashion and culture is cyclical. It comes and goes,” he said. “When the trend tails off, so does your business. But optimism is not a trend. It’s empowering to celebrate life’s simple pleasures.”

[via - NYTimes]

Mathematical Fortune-Telling

2007-11-02T03:36:00.000-07:00

How well can game theory solve business and political disputes?

Predicting the future is not very hard, according to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: a little mathematics is all you need. Figuring out how to manipulate a situation to achieve specific aims is a bit less straightforward, but Bueno de Mesquita says his mathematical tools can usually do that, too.

The New York University political science professor has developed a computerized game theory model that predicts the future of many business and political negotiations and also figures out ways to influence the outcome. Two independent evaluations, one by academics and one by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, have both shown that about 90 percent of his predictions have been accurate. Most recently, he has used his mathematical tools to offer approaches for handling the growing nuclear crisis with Iran.

Bueno de Mesquita provides the computer tools, but he relies on political or business experts to identify specific issues, their possible outcomes, and the key players. He asks experts narrow, carefully delineated questions about which outcome each player would prefer, how important the issue is to each player, and how much influence each player can exert. But he does not ask about the history of the conflict, the cultural norms of the area, or what the experts think will happen.

With careful interviewing, Bueno de Mesquita finds that he can get experts to agree on what information the model needs as input, even when the experts disagree sharply on expected outcomes. Once, after generating a report for the CIA using information from the agency's experts, he had his students assemble the same information from news reports. "Over 90 percent of them came up with the same results as I got [when I was] locked in a lead-lined vault at the CIA headquarters," Bueno de Mesquita says. "It's basic information that experts agree on and that you can even find in The Economist."

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has led a shift in
political science toward quantitative models.
Analyses of his model of political decision-making
show that it has a 90 percent accuracy rate.
Courtesy of Bueno de Mesquita

The elements of the model are players standing in for the real-life people who influence a negotiation or decision. At each round of the game, players make proposals to one or more of the other players and reject or accept proposals made to them. Through this process, the players learn about one another and adapt their future proposals accordingly. Each player incurs a small cost for making a proposal. Once the accepted proposals are good enough that no player is willing to go to the trouble to make another proposal, the game ends. The accepted proposals are the predicted outcome.

To accommodate the vagaries of human nature, the players are cursed with divided souls. Although all the players want to get their own preferred policies adopted, they also want personal glory. Some players are policy-wonks who care only a little about glory, while others resemble egomaniacs for whom policies are secondary. Only the players themselves know how much they care about each of those goals. An important aspect of the negotiation process is that by seeing which proposals are accepted or rejected, players are able to figure out more about how much other players care about getting their preferred policy or getting the glory.

The details of his study of negotiation options with Iran are classified, but Bueno de Mesquita says that the broad outline is that there is nothing the United States can do to prevent Iran from pursuing nuclear energy for civilian power generation. The more aggressively the U.S. responds to Iran, he says, the more likely it is that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. The upshot of the study, Bueno de Mesquita argues, is that the international community needs to find out if there is a way to monitor civilian nuclear energy projects in Iran thoroughly enough to ensure that Iran is not developing weapons.

One of his most famous past predictions also concerned Iran. In 1984, the model predicted that when Ayatollah Khomeini died, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khameini and a little-known cleric named Hasheimi Rafsanjani would rise to succeed Khomeini as leaders of Iran. At the time, most experts considered that outcome exceedingly unlikely, since Khomeini had designated a different person as his successor. But in fact, when Khomeini died five years later, Rafsanjani and Khameini succeeded him.

Bueno de Mesquita says he also predicted that Andropov would succeed Brezhnev long before experts considered it likely. He foresaw that China would reclaim Hong Kong 12 years before it happened, and he predicted that France would narrowly pass the European Union's Maastricht Treaty.

Former CIA analyst Stanley Feder says that he has used Bueno de Mesquita's model well over a thousand times since the early 1980s to make predictions about specific policies. Like others, he has found it to be more than 90 percent accurate. In situations where predictions of the model differed from experts' predictions, the model always turned out to be correct.

"I'm always stunned that it works so well," Bueno de Mesquita says. "This 90 percent is not my assessment."

The main reason that the model generates more reliable predictions than experts do is that "the computer doesn't get bored, it doesn't get tired, and it doesn't forget," he says. In the analysis of nuclear technology development in Iran, for example, experts identified 80 relevant players. Because no individual can keep track of all the possible interactions between so many players, human analysts focus on five or six key players. The lesser players may not have a lot of power, Buena de Mesquita says, but they tend to be knowledgeable enough to influence how key decision-makers understand the issues. His model can keep track of those influences when a human can't.

"Given expert input of data for the variables for such a model, it would not surprise me in the least to see that it would perform well," says Branislav L. Slantchev, a political scientist and game theorist at the University of California at San Diego. Predictions based on game theory can fail in a context where people don't act rationally, but in Buena de Mesquita's work, Slantchev says, rational action mostly means that the players are promoting their own perceived interests as best they can, something humans tend to do.

However, he points out that the model relies on having a considerable amount of expert input. "Honestly, if you had all this information," Slantchev says, "you should be able to predict fairly well how the issue would be resolved." The main reason that the model does this better than experts is that it "strips ideological blindfolds, cultural prejudice, and normative commitments that very often color the view of experts."

Buena de Mesquita offers his services through Mesquita and Roundell, a company he founded that uses his model to advise businesses and governments. "It's pretty exciting when you sit down with a client," he says, "and you know that they're making decisions involving life and death questions or billions of dollars, and at the end of the day they are relying on a body of equations."

[via - Julie J. Rehmeyer]

The New Nostradamus

2007-11-02T02:45:00.000-07:00

Can a fringe branch of mathematics forecast the future? A special adviser to the CIA, Fortune 500 companies, and the U.S. Department of Defense certainly thinks so.

If you listen to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and a lot of people don’t, he’ll claim that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. What’s more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. Naturally, there is also no shortage of people less fond of his work. “Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack.”

Today, on a rare sunny summer day in San Francisco, Bueno de Mesquita appears to be neither. He’s relaxing in his stately home, answering my questions with exceeding politesse. Sunlight streams through the tall windows, the melodic sound of a French horn echoing from somewhere upstairs; his daughter, a musician in a symphony orchestra, is practicing for an upcoming recital. It’s all so complacent and genteel, which is exactly what Bueno de Mesquita isn’t. As if on cue, a question sets him off. “I found it to be offensive,” he says about a colleague’s critique of his work. “This is absolutely, totally, and utterly false,” he says about the attack of another.

The criticism rankles him, because, to his mind, the proof is right there on the page. “I’ve published a lot of forecasting papers over the years,” he says. “Papers that are about things that had not yet happened when the paper was published but would happen within some reasonable amount of time. There’s a track record that I can point to.” And indeed there is. Bueno de Mesquita has made a slew of uncannily accurate predictions—more than 2,000, on subjects ranging from the terrorist threat to America to the peace process in Northern Ireland—that would seem to prove him right.

“The days of the digital watch are numbered,” quipped Tom Stoppard. After spending a few hours with Bueno de Mesquita, you might come to believe that so is everything else. Numbered as in “mathematics”—more precisely, game theory, an esoteric branch of mathematics used to analyze interaction. “Game theory is math for how people behave strategically,” Bueno de Mesquita says.

Bueno de Mesquita has big ideas, and he’s more than happy to put his career on the line for them. Back in March 2004, when al-Qaeda bombed a Madrid train station, influencing the course of Spain’s general election three days later, a lot of U.S. security folks were nervous. Worried that al-Qaeda might try something similar here in the run-up to the November, 2004, presidential elections, the Pentagon hired Bueno de Mesquita to run some data through his forecasting model to tell them what to expect. The results were unequivocal. “I said there would be no homeland attack. I also indicated that bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, would resurface around Thanksgiving, 2004,” he says. Just after the elections in November that year, Zawahiri released a new videotape. Bueno de Mesquita was right on both counts. “One of the things government needs most is advice that’s not wishy-washy. I try to be as precise as I can.”

For the record, this man is not some lunatic soothsayer sequestered in a musty, forgotten basement office. He is the chairman of New York University’s Department of Politics, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the author of many weighty academic tomes. He regularly consults with the CIA and the Department of Defense—most recently on such hot-button topics as Iran and North Korea—and has a new book coming out in the fall that he cowrote with his pal Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. His curriculum vitae, which details his various Ph.Ds, academic appointments, editorial-board memberships, writings, honors, awards, and grants, runs 17 small-font pages long.

He is wildly controversial, though. As one of the foremost scholars of game theory—or “rational choice,” as its political-science practitioners prefer to call it—Bueno de Mesquita is at the center of a raging hullabaloo that has taken over some of the most prestigious halls of learning in this country. Exclusive, highly complex mathematically, and messianic in its certainty of universal truths, rational-choice theory is not only changing the way political science is taught, but the way it’s defined.

To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

How does Bueno de Mesquita do this? With mathematics. “You start with a set of assumptions, as you do with anything, but you do it in a formal, mathematical way,” he says. “You break them down as equations and work from there to see what follows logically from those assumptions.” The assumptions he’s talking about concern each actor’s motives. You configure those motives into equations that are, essentially, statements of logic based on a predictive theory of how people with those motives will behave. From there, you start building your mathematical model. You determine whether the predictive theory holds true by plugging in data, which are numbers derived from scales of preferences that you ascribe to each actor based on the various choices they face.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma, a basic in game theory, explains it well: Two burglars are apprehended near the scene of a crime and are interrogated separately by the police. The police know these two goons did it, but they don’t know how, so they offer each one a deal. If they both confess and cooperate, they’ll both get a minor sentence of five years. If neither man confesses, they’ll both only get one year (for having been caught with some of the stolen loot on them). But, and here’s where it gets interesting, if one confesses and the other doesn’t, the one who confesses walks out scot-free while the other will do 10 years. What will they do? Will they trust each other and do what’s obviously in their best interest, which is not confess? Based on game theory’s assumptions about human nature, the math derived from this dilemma tells you squarely that the two goons will turn each other in.

“In the foreboding world view of rational choice, everyone is a raging dirtbag.”

Which illustrates the next incontrovertible fact about game theory: In the foreboding world view of rational choice, everyone is a raging dirtbag. Bueno de Mesquita points to dictatorships to prove his point: “If you liberate people from the constraint of having to satisfy other people in order to advance themselves, people don’t do good things.” When analyzing a problem in international relations, Bueno de Mesquita doesn’t give a whit about the local culture, history, economy, or any of the other considerations that more traditional political scientists weigh. In fact, rational choicers like Bueno de Mesquita tend to view such traditional approaches with a condescension bordering on disdain. “One is the study of politics as an expression of personal opinion as opposed to political science,” he says dryly. His only concern is with what the political actors want, what they say they want (often two very different things), and how each of their various options will affect their career advancement. He feeds this data into his computer model and out pop the answers.

Though controversial in the academic world, Bueno de Mesquita and his model have proven quite popular in the private sector. In addition to his teaching responsibilities and consulting for the government, he also runs a successful private business, Mesquita & Roundell, with offices in Rockefeller Center. Advising some of the top companies in the country, he earns a tidy sum: Mesquita & Roundell’s minimum fee is $50,000 for a project that includes two issues. Most projects involve multiple issues. “I’m not selling my wisdom,” he says. “I’m selling a tool that can help them get better results. That tool is the model.”

“In the private sector, we deal with three areas: litigation, mergers and acquisitions, and regulation,” he says. “On average in litigation, we produce a settlement that is 40 percent better than what the attorneys think is the best that can be achieved.” While Bueno de Mesquita’s present client list is confidential, past clients include Union Carbide, which needed a little help in structuring its defense after its 1984 chemical-plant disaster in Bhopal, India, claimed the lives of an estimated 22,000 people; the giant accounting firm Arthur Andersen; and British Aerospace during its merger with GEC-Marconi.

But there are limits to what his company will do. For example, Bueno de Mesquita may already know, but he won’t say who’ll succeed George W. Bush in the White House. “We have a corporate policy that we will not, on a commercial basis, use the model in campaigns,” he says. “We don’t think it’s appropriate to manipulate the democratic process. We won’t take a client who wants to manipulate U.S. government policy, even if we agree with the manipulation. And we won’t take a foreign client whose objectives are contrary to the objectives of the United States government.”

There’s also the book he’s written with Condoleezza Rice and two other authors, The Strategy of Campaigning, which comes out in the fall. Given the Bush administration’s heavy ideological bent—which would seem to represent everything a rationalist like Bueno de Mesquita opposes—how does he justify putting his name on the same dust jacket as Rice’s? Bueno de Mesquita repositions himself in his chair. “The central question in this book is a question that Condi raised before she came to Washington,” he says. (So is her name there just to sell books? “We are making a concerted effort not to play up the fact that the Secretary of State is a co-author,” he later adds.)

Meanwhile, he has just launched and is the director of NYU’s Alexander Hamilton Center. “The mission for the center is the application of logic and evidence to solving fundamental policy problems. Not to a bipartisan solution, but to a nonpartisan solution.” In his continuing work for the CIA and the Defense Department, one of his most recent assignments has been North Korea and its nuclear program. His analysis starts from the premise that what Kim Jong Il cares most about is his political survival. As Bueno de Mesquita sees it, the principal reason for his nuclear program is to deter the United States from taking him out, by raising the costs of doing so. “The solution, then, lies in a mechanism that guarantees us that he not use these weapons and guarantees him that we not interfere with his political survival,” he says.

“They said my work was evil, offensive, that it should be suppressed. It was a very difficult time in my career.
—Bruce Bueno de Mesquita”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the recent agreement that the United States reached with the government of Pyongyang closely resembles the one that Bueno de Mesquita’s model suggested: Kim agrees to dismantle his existing nuclear weapons but not his existing nuclear capability. “He puts it in mothballs with IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors on site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And in exchange, we provide him with $1.2 billion a year, which we label ‘foreign aid,’ of course.” The “foreign-aid” figure published in the newspapers was $400 million, which concerns Bueno de Mesquita. “I read that and I said, I hope that’s not the deal because it’s not enough money. He needs $1.2 billion, approximately, to sustain the loyalty of his cronies in the military and so forth. It’s unpleasant, this is a nasty man, but we’re stuck with it. The nice part of the deal is that it’s self-enforcing. Each side has a reason to credibly commit to their part of the deal.”

Recently, he’s applied his science to come up with some novel ideas on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”

Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

His first foray into forecasting controversy took place in 1984, when he published an article in PS, the flagship journal of the American Political Science Association, predicting who would succeed Iran’s ruling Ayatollah Khomeini upon his death. He had developed a rudimentary forecasting model that was different from anything anyone had seen before in that it was not designed around one particular foreign-policy problem, but could be applied to any international conflict. “It was the first attempt at a general mathematical model of international conflict,” he says. His model predicted that upon Khomeini’s death, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khamenei and an obscure junior cleric named Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would emerge to lead the country together. At the time, Rafsanjani was so little known that his name had yet to appear in the New York Times.

Even more improbably, Khomeini had already designated his successor, and it was neither Ayatollah Khamenei nor Rafsanjani. Khomeini’s stature among Iran’s ruling clerics made it inconceivable that they would defy their leader’s choice. At the APSA meeting subsequent to the article’s publication, Bueno de Mesquita was roundly denounced as a quack by the Iran experts—a charlatan peddling voodoo mathematics. “They said I was an idiot, basically. They said my work was evil, offensive, that it should be suppressed,” he recalls. “It was a very difficult time in my career.” Five years later, when Khomeini died, lo and behold, Iran’s fractious ruling clerics chose Ayatollah Khamenei and Hashemi Rafsanjani to jointly lead the country. At the next APSA meeting, the man who had been Bueno de Mesquita’s most vocal detractor raised his hand and publicly apologized to him.

Bueno de Mesquita had arrived, and so, too, had rational-choice theory. Rational choicers began sprouting up in political-science departments around the country and, say their critics, strangling anyone and anything in their way. By 2000, according to one estimate, some 40 percent of all articles published in the prestigious American Political Science Review were rational-choice themed. Increasingly, graduate students in political science viewed a fluency in formal mathematic modeling as a prerequisite for career advancement. And the leaps in technology taking place only fueled rational choice’s advance: faster, more powerful computers allowed rational choicers to build bigger, ever more complex models that could be applied to ever more complex situations. And, naturally enough, an intellectual counteroffensive was launched.

It began in 1994 when two Yale political-science professors, Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, published their book, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, which disputed much of the scientific underpinnings that rational choice claimed for itself. In essence, the authors said that when rational choice was actually put to the practical test, much of it simply didn’t work. This was followed by a 1999 (lightning speed in academia) article by Stephen M. Walt in the journal International Security called “Rigor or Rigor Mortis?” Walt, a political-science professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, conceded some value to formal modeling but ultimately likened rational choice to a “cult of irrelevance” that stifled creativity and had little practical value in actual policy formulation. Most vexing, Walt accused rational choicers of regarding nonrational choice theorists such as himself as “methodological Luddites whose opposition rests largely on ignorance.”

“We found that [national intelligence] analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to [Bueno de Mesquita’s] forecasts. If you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.
—Stanley Feder, former CIA analyst”

Since no one snaps a towel back harder than a scorned academic, Bueno de Mesquita and several of his rational-choice cohorts immediately mounted a blistering counter-counteroffensive, firing off a series of lengthy rebuttals to Walt’s piece that deconstructed his criticism, questioned his facts, and cited what was in their view Walt’s muddled logic as a prime example of why rational choice was so desperately needed in the field. “In the piece that Steve Walt wrote, in which he acknowledged that logical consistency was important, he also argued that it was overrated, that it stifled creativity. To me this is a bizarre idea,” says Bueno de Mesquita, “because really what that statement means to me is, if you relax logical consistency, you can say whatever you feel like and therefore you are back to a world in which the study of politics is the expression of personal opinion instead of being political science. It’s the art of politics or the articulation of beliefs, which is what dominates much of advising to government. It’s rhetoric.”

The brouhaha culminated at a raucous APSA meeting in 2001 at San Francisco’s Hilton Hotel with the open revolt of a group of major-league political scientists who, one by one, took to the podium to rail against rational choice and its encroaching methodological orthodoxy. Dubbed the “Perestroika Movement” by its anonymous founder (apparently, rational-choice folk are a powerful and vindictive lot), the dissident group vowed to take a stand against “the domination of mathematical approaches to the discipline.” There is a “hegemonic threat out there,” warned John J. Mearsheimer, a noted professor of international relations at the University of Chicago. “This is about the mathematicization of political science,” he said. “I’m in favor of filling the zoo with all kinds of animals. But I’m concerned about them running us out of the business or making us marginal.” Ultimately, the Perestroikans did win some concessions: a new editor of the APSR who vowed to make the flagship journal more hospitable to mathematics-free articles and a pledge from the APSA to open up its method of appointing officers. “The APSA had become dominated by those practicing so-called rigorous analyses,” says Walt. “Now the pendulum has swung back a bit.”

For Bueno de Mesquita, getting his methodology accepted by the policy-making establishment remains somewhat of an uphill slog. The most pointed criticism of rational choice has been that, unlike with more traditional political scientists, very little cross-pollination takes place between rational-choice academics and government policy-makers. Bueno de Mesquita says it’s just a matter of time before that changes. “Because people who are in a position to appoint people weren’t trained in this way, they don’t feel as comfortable as with people who were trained in what I would describe as a less rigorous form of study of politics. And, so, the folks who do more rigorous work typically don’t get invited in,” he says. Of course, the same was true of economics 40 years ago when nontechnical types like John Kenneth Galbraith dominated the field. Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman changed all that, and Bueno de Mesquita sees himself playing the same role for politics.

Bueno de Mesquita remains unfazed, ever certain that rational choice will ultimately prevail. “When I moved to Rochester in 1973, if you wanted to be trained in this kind of political science, you could go to Rochester, period,” he says. “Ten years later, you could go to Rochester, Caltech, and Washington University in St. Louis. If you asked me today, you could go to the places I just mentioned, and you could go to NYU, you could go to Stanford—there’s a long list of places you could go. Except, of course, Harvard. But it will happen there, too. I’m on their syllabus.”

Back to the Future

A sample of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s wilder—and most accurate—predictions

Forecasted the second Intifada and the death of the Mideast peace process, two years before it happened.

Defied Russia specialists by predicting who would succeed Brezhnev. “The model identified Andropov, who nobody at the time even considered a possibility,” he says.

Predicted that Daniel Ortega and the Sandanistas would be voted out of office in Nicaragua, two years before it happened.

Four months before Tiananmen Square, said China’s hardliners would crack down harshly on dissidents.

Predicted France’s hair’s-breadth passage of the European Union’s Maastricht Treaty.

Predicted the exact implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between Britain and the IRA.

Predicted China’s reclaiming of Hong Kong and the exact manner the handover would take place, 12 years before it happened.

[via: Words by Michael A.M. Lerner; Photos by Ethan Hill]

How to make easy money using Internet

2007-10-28T11:24:00.000-07:00

1. Get a credit card with 12-month 0% APR balance transfer promotion

If the only purpose of getting a new card is to use the interest free period to make money, then length of the promotion period is the key. There are many cards offer a 12-month period with 0% introductory rate. Any period that’s shorter than 12 months is less desirable, unless you can use the card even without the 0% rate. For existing cards, however, a shorter term such as 9 months or 6 months is acceptable, but you need even larger amount to make up the fees. The shortest term I had was 4 months.

2. Request a convenient check to transfer balance

Not all issuers send out convenient checks right after the card is issued. If the promotion period starts from the time a balance is transferred, you can wait till the condition is right (such as the interest rate of your savings account if you expect it to go up in the coming months). I know Discover Card’s promotion starts when the card is issued. If that’s the case, do the transfer immediately after receiving the card.

To expedite the process, call the issuer when the card arrives and request a convenient check. It’s better to get a blank check, but there are credit card company requires your name and the amount you want to transfer be printed on the check before they can send it to you. Once the check is in, just deposit the money into your bank account.

3. Or make the transfer over the phone

If you feel comfortable, you also initiate the transfer on the phone and have the money sent to your bank account directly (you have to provide your bank’s routing number and your account number). I did that a couple of time with Bank of America and Chase which already have my bank information from the online bill pay.

Things will a lot easier if you transfer the money right to your bank account, but that’s not always the case. For instance, last year Discover insisted I can only use the money to pay balance on another credit card. If this is what’s happening, it’s less desirable but still doable if you have cards that can issue refund for over payment. Check out my previous post on how to use Citi card to transfer balance.

4. Consolidate credit limits to get the most out of the deal

It would be impossible for me to have $100K in balance transfer without some consolidations. If you have multiple accounts with the same issuer, you can get the most out of the deal by consolidating your existing credit limits. All you need to is call the credit card company and tell them to move credit lines from this and that card to the card with 0% offer. Just move the credit lines, but don’t close the accounts as they are likely to be older than the card you just got. When the game is over, you can always move the lines back to those cards if you wish. I have done credit consolidations before and it’s quite easy to do.

5. Don’t spend the money and don’t buy stocks with the money as well

Nobody can predict where the market will be one year from now. If you don’t have other funds to cover the balance when the transfer expires, you will have to sell your stocks which could be losing money at that time. Just save the money in a high yield savings account. There are plenty of online savings accounts offer 5+% interest rate. Keep the money in liquid accounts so you can have an easy access. In case something unexpected happens (like late in making payment), you can pay the money back right away.

6. Pay more than the minimum on time every month

If you are late in making minimum payment, even once, you are screwed. So make sure you give enough time to let your payment hit the card ahead of the deadline. And paying the bill online instead of mailing a check can reduce the risk of late payment. In addition, adding $10 more to the minimum payment is always a good practice.

7. Confirm the payoff date

Call the issuer one month early to confirm the last day the balance has to be paid off to avoid any financial charge. Don’t just assume the date on the offer letter is the deadline. Also, since transferring money via ACH usually requires at least three business days before the fund settles, give yourself enough time to arrange the money and pay off the entire balance without any delay.

Finally, there are a couple of items that you should be careful when playing the credit card arbitrage:

Think twice before getting a new card for balance transfer if the fee depends on the amount transferred (such as the 3% fee that Citi charges). The profit will be eroded even if you can get 5+% return from a savings account.
Make sure there’s no balance from purchases on the card before making the transfer. Since any payment you make will be automatically used to pay balance with the lowest interest rate, the charge from your regular purchase will started to accumulate interests until you pay off the entire balance, including that from 0% transfer. Edit: And don’t use the credit card until the balance transfer money is paid off either for the same reason (Thanks Tim ).
Read carefully the deadline on your offer letter. If it says something like “the billing cycle includes August 31, 2008,” then August 31, 2008 is NOT the deadline to pay off the balance and avoid financial charges. Depending on the date of your billing cycle, you may have to give the money back well ahead of August 31, 2008. Call the issuer to confirm the deadline.

The Value of A Lifetime Client

2007-10-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

I’ve been in the business world for almost 10 years, and I know most savvy business owners understand the importance of maintaining a good relationships with their customers. They know happy customer will keep repurchasing for many years. However, most cannot answer if you were asked them what’s the actual value of a lifetime customer is.Once they knew the answer , most businesses will not go cheap in customer acquisition and retention. Jay Abraham, the super marketing guru that charges USD50,000 for business consultation had this to say in his book, “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got”:

“The current lifetime value of one of your clients is the total profit of an average client over the lifetime of his or her patronage – including all residual sales, less advertising, marketing, and incremental product or service-fulfillment expenses.

Let’s say that your typical new client brings you an average profit of $75 on the first sale. He or she repurchases three more times a year, with an average reorder amount of $300, and on each $300 reorder you make $150 gross profit.

Now, with the average patronage life lasting two years, every new client is worth $975. You could theoretically afford to spend up to $975 to bring in a new client and still break even.”

When you see $975 as the value of a lifetime customer, you will know your initial expenditure is indeed an investment .

Why Customer Service is Even More Important these days?

2007-10-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows that customer service is important. However, most are clueless about how customer service can have a direct impact in their lives. If everyone knows customer service is important, why do most of us only pay lip service to it or adopt a lukewarm attitude towards providing an excellent customer service?

This is a true story that happened today.

I walked into a well-known electrical store with full intention to cart back 2 standing fans that very moment. The spacious outlet was quite empty with just a few lingering customers browsing around; I thought the purchase would be a breeze. I was deadly wrong.

I saw a suitable model but there were no sales consultants there. I looked at the customer service counter and noticed more than 10 sales consultants sitting or standing there, resting or chatting. I waved at them, and gesturing towards my ideal fan, the eager consumer that I was at that time. A few saw me but never bothered to stand up. Then, one with a tie, probably the supervisor, looked at me and then back to his staff, “Hey, someone go help that lady”.A woman in her mid-thirties reluctantly got up and came to me, “Yes, what you want?” There was no smile, no friendliness. I asked for the price and her answer was curt and short, “This one $99, no discount.” Without waiting for me to utter another word, she headed back to her team and start chatting away. Well, I walked out as my money is no good here.

This is so ironic when this store paid its advertising agency an obscene amount of money on TV commercials, full-colour press advertisements, promotional booklets to attract customers and when the customer actually walks in, she is ignored. The marketing communications maxim of “A.I.D.A.” states that your campaign needs Attract attention in order to arouse sufficient Interest to create a Desire to own and thereby induce Action. I was attracted by the sales ad, curious to find out more choices in store, definitely want 2 fans and took time to pop by. Their campaign is successful but it did not make them the sale. In fact, it wasted good money on advertising campaign. What went wrong? Absolutely, definitely, on site customer service!

Customer service is more than a smile, more than acknowledging a customer. These days, products are fast becoming commodities with few differentiations. What would make the distinction is the brand value and customer relationship management. A strong brand is a promise to the customer, it is a differentiating factor that distinguishes your products from other offerings in the market. More importantly, it also enables the company to build customer loyalty as the people will remember the brand and its quality. While CRM creates and sustains customer loyalty as well as promoting customer retention. The core value is in increasing customer value while reducing the cost of sales. And this store just increased it’s cost by ignoring customer!

Customer service concepts aside, I cannot understand how these sales consultants could ignore a customer. Customers are the ones that pay their boss who in turn pay for their salaries, overtime, bonus, commission, medical benefits, insurance, etc. Customers likes to do business with companies that treat them like kings. When a company offers great customer services, not only will customers return but would also spread words among friends and families. That’s one contributing factor to how a company is to build to last. When you are nice to others, others will be nice to you. What goes around will come around.

What does customer service depend upon? The company must have customer friendly policies set from the top and these executives must see that the policies are seriously being carried out both internally and externally. If the staff does not know the value of lifelong client is ignorant about how to retain customer loyalty or reluctant to provide that “extra mile”, the sincerity will not shine through the smiles and greetings. Don’t you detest those mechanical and almost robotic words with absolutely no warmth and meaning in them?

More importantly, don’t you just hate it when you went all the way there and had to go back empty-handed?

CRM Is the Cheapest Form of Marketing

2007-10-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

Customer Relations Management (CRM) is an essential component of marketing but many people - even marketers - see it as a separate and non-related entity.

A while back, I shared in my post Why Customer Service is Even More Important these days an unpleasant experience at a well known electronics store. I was a willing customer determined to make 2 electric fan purchases, and no one bothered. There is no use spending good money in marketing, advertising and promotion in the background and to have people in the front line destroy all the goodwill created.

It is frustrating to find that so many companies chose to ignore this. In fact, customer service is the cheapest way to build long term trust and credibility and create repeat businesses among current clients. Customer relations management is indeed a marketing discipline, and should not be seen as an expense or an operational cost. I know I have been quoting Peter Drucker very often but there’s so much truth in:

“Marketing and innovation are the two chief functions of business. You get paid for creating a customer, which is marketing. And you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance, which is innovation. Everything else is a cost center.”

Much of the marketing investment of any marketing campaign are made in:
creating the message
pushing these messages to the targeted markets and
turning prospects into new customers

After a prospect becomes a client, awareness marketing makes much less of an impact on his decision to buy again. The reason being that the client is influenced by other factors. Did the product meet his satisfaction level? Did he find it tedious to drive 1.5 hours just to buy the product? Was he upset at being put on hold for 15 minutes? Did he find the online order form a breeze to use? Loyalty marketing becomes very important for repeat (aka loyal) customers. Yet only a small budget is allocated for loyalty marketing.

Marketers usually spent as much as 80% of marketing dollars on awareness marketing to create visibility and new customer acquisition. If a new customer has a problem with the product and has to spend 45 minutes getting someone to talk to him, do you really think that a creative, or even sexy, campaign can convince him to buy again? A consumer usually will be a one-time sucker only. Who wants to be a fool twice?

Many large multinational companies have outsourced their call centres to foreign lands in view of lower manpower cost. Complaints from their customers - mostly on the difficulty in understanding a different ascent - convinced some of the companies to move their call centres back home. It’s not worth spending good money on marketing and have it washed away with poor customer service. Damage Control and Crisis Management will suck up more time and resources to undo the “bad things” and get back into the customers’ good book again.

There are 2 ways to improve customer service:

Place CRM under the command of the marketing head. He can build CRM into his marketing efforts. Marketing and Customer Service can thus leverage on each other.

Educate and enlighten those who are in Customer Service to see themselves as Brand Embassador and regard them dutifully as so. If you keep referring them as “support”, they will not see themselves as an important component of marketing. We need more than one pillar to create a sturdy bridge.

We all like our marketing efforts to be good, fast and cheap. Start by having a strong customer relations management and you soon realize that it is one of the cheapest forms of marketing.

Ten Smartest Ways to Live Beneath Your Means

2007-10-28T10:53:00.001-07:00

I managed to retire at age 51, and the way I did it was to live beneath my means.

You can adopt this strategy too, by simply spending less than you earn. You may think that's impossible for you, but if you make it a challenge instead of a chore, you'll soon be creating ways to cut corners in everything you do. And believe me, it all adds up.

There are no secrets to this strategy. It's just common sense. Here are my 10 favorite ways to live beneath your means:

Whenever possible, buy store brands. Nearly half the cost for name brands goes to advertising. Usually their quality isn't any better than store brands, which frequently carry a money back guarantee. This is true not only with food, but also cleaning supplies and paper products. Even if the savings are small on an individual item, using this strategy every time you shop makes a big difference. Remember, this is a long-term plan.
Avoid prepared foods.We're all pressed for time, but buying prepared foods can be expensive. You pay extra for the convenience and get a meal full of chemicals and preservatives too. Instead, put your main course in a Crock Pot before you leave for work, or put frozen meat in the refrigerator to thaw before you go to bed. Once you learn to plan ahead, you'll be surprised how much you'll save.
Shop at "you-bag-it" supermarkets. Stores like Aldi and Save-a-Lot can cut your grocery bill substantially. When you're not subsidizing a store's deli section, flower shop, or bakery, you'll find the rest of the food cheaper. No-frills supermarkets cut overhead by having fewer employees, smaller buildings to heat and cool, and primarily store brands. You'll quickly notice the savings.
Brown bag your lunch. I did this for years and it saved me thousands. Brown bagging has three benefits: You'll avoid greasy, high-calorie fast food; you'll save money; and you'll be more satisfied on your job, since lunch with coworkers often turns into gripe sessions.
Don't buy clothes or shoes with designer labels. Who do you want to make rich, some fashion designer, or you? That trendy label will cost you at least 50% extra. Instead of impressing your friends, impress yourself by adding that savings to your bank account.
Use coupons, but be smart about it. When a name brand product still costs more than a store brand, even after the deduction for a coupon, it's no bargain. Most coupons are for new products companies want you to try, so be selective. You can get coupons online at sites like Coupons.com or Couponcabin.com, or search under "coupons."
Buy used books instead of new. I visit two used book sales a year put on by local charities and get an armload of reading for less than $15. I choose used books on Amazon.com. I got my copy of The Purpose Driven Life on Amazon, paying the standard $3.99 shipping and handling, but only 39 cents for a used copy. Even better? Check out books for free at your local public library. Most libraries have DVDs and CDs, too.
Keep your car as long as you can. A shiny new car may impress your family and friends, but it simply costs too much. My current car is nine years old and runs like a dream because I have it serviced regularly. Today's cars, with electronic ignition, fuel injectors and superb rust protection, can last well past 150,000 miles if taken care of.
Severely restrict your credit card spending. Credit cards make money unreal. They take the thought process and discipline out of your buying. Before you know it, you're deep in debt and getting further behind because you can't make even the minimum monthly payment. When you pay in cash and watch those bills disappear from your wallet, you become much more careful. You relearn the value of money. You question every purchase, and that's when you become smart.
Reward yourself for your efforts. Your goal is to be frugal, not a miser. Small rewards--within your budget--are a wise way to keep fun in your life. Living beneath your means takes self-control, but the emotional and financial benefits are tremendous. An occasional treat energizes you to keep up the good work.

Much of living beneath your means requires seeing through the false promises of prestige and fulfillment found in advertising. You're too smart to fall for that. And, it takes discipline to resist peer pressure, but whenever you're doing something worthwhile, you have to stand up for your convictions. Living beneath your means is a proven way to avoid debt and the stress that goes with it. If I can do it, you can too.

Forbes Announces Best Cities For Jobs

2007-10-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

Job seekers in 2007 should be turning their eyes to the South and the West, according to a new study by Forbes magazine.

In its annual Best Cities for Jobs list, nine of Forbes’ top 10 cities either lie below the Mason-Dixon line, or west beyond the Rocky Mountains. None of the major U.S. cities like New York, Los Angeles or Chicago made the top 10. New York, considered the financial capital of the world, came in at No. 63, up from its No. 99 ranking in 2005.

To compile the rankings, Forbes used five data points. They were unemployment rate, job growth, income growth, median household income and cost of living for 2006 because only partial data is so far available for 2007. The data was applied to the largest 100 metropolitan areas, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, and data was also obtained from Moody's Economy.com.

Salt Lake City, which topped the list, moved up from No. 6 last year and No. 12 in 2005. Traditionally, Salt Lake City’s economy has been driven by mining and steel, but its conversion to a center for tech-based industries has propelled it to the top of the list. The city has the second lowest rate of unemployment, the fourth-highest job rate growth and the fourth-highest income rate growth.
Raleigh, N.C. Raleigh fell from its previous No. 1 ranking, which it held for 2005 and 2006. It has a stable housing market, and Duke, the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University attract educated workers and tech firms. It is 17th in unemployment, fifth in job growth, and 12th in cost of living.
Phoenix is ranked No. 1 on the list for job growth and fifth for income growth. But according to Forbes, its No. 1 job growth ranking is due in a large part to a housing development, and given the recent housing bust it should fall on next year’s list.
Jacksonville, Fla. made a gigantic leap on the list, rising from a No. 42 ranking last year. It is ninth in lowest unemployment, 20th in job growth and 22nd in income growth. It sports the second largest port on the East Coast, making it the leading transportation and distribution hub in the state.
Orlando, Fla. Like Phoenix, Forbes expects Orlando to fall in future lists due to the downturn in the housing market. It was ranked 15th last year, is 10th in job growth and has the fifth lowest unemployment.
Tulsa, Okla moved up from No. 35, mostly due to a large increase in the income growth rate, at which it ranks seventh. Tulsa has diversified business base, which includes aerospace, construction, high technology, transportation, telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, education, and energy.
Austin, Texas is another city that moved up significantly after being ranked 23rd on last year’s list. It has become a center for high-tech companies and has attracted workers due to its lower housing costs than Silicon Valley. Thousands of graduates every year from the University of Texas at Austin keep the tech industry with a steady flow of educated workers
Albuquerque, N.M. moved up from No. 24 on last year’s list. It is the first time it has ranked in the top ten in income growth, coming in at No. 10. Like other cities that have moved up on the list, Albuquerque is a center for high-tech companies and government projects that have fueled its growth.
Wichita, Kan., the lone representative from the Midwest on the top ten, ranked No. 57 on last year’s list. Known as the Air Capital of the World, it is home to McConnell Air Force Base and six aircraft manufacturing companies.
Oklahoma City, Okla. Another rapid mover, Oklahoma City ranked 67th on last years list. It ranks sixth in income growth, 15th in cost of living and 25th in unemployment. Oklahoma City has been a traditional base for energy companies like Chesapeake Energy and Devon Energy, but its economic growth has partly been fueled by diversification into fields like information technology and health services.

[via - KNBC]

Inside the mind of a crazy (rich) inventor

2007-10-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

(FSB Magazine) Indianapolis -- You probably don't know the name Scott Jones, but chances are his life has touched yours. Checked your voicemail lately? You've got Jones to thank. Pop a CD in your computer, and iTunes brings up the track names. That feature comes from another of Jones's companies, Gracenote. When Indiana last year adopted daylight savings time, it was Jones who pushed hardest for the change. The roller coaster at the Indianapolis Zoo? Jones. Dinosaur skeletons at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis? Made possible in part by the Scott A. Jones Foundation.

Most folks in the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel (pronounced like the candy) know their wealthy, energetic neighbor as "the guy who invented voicemail." In the early '90s Jones made about $50 million on his company, which created the predominate form of voicemail, and he "retired" at age 31. But he found he wasn't the kind of entrepreneur who could just fly off into the sunset in his helicopter. Over the past two decades this driven inventor has been generating ideas for new products and companies - some were successful, others hit the scrap heap - at a pace that would make Thomas Edison's head spin.

Jones's latest company, ChaCha (chacha.com), is developing a potential rival to Google - a search engine assisted by human experts who will help you find your answer. And here's what Jones claims to have on deck: self-propelled robotic lawn mowers, a method to sequence your entire DNA in one minute, a way to make humans fly.

From anyone else these might seem the ravings of a madman. But Jones backs up his ideas with a fortune he estimates to be worth $150 million, a brain that lets him keep pace with the geekiest of scientists, and a knack for managing startups. His ambition is to change the way people live, and he figures that any one of his half a dozen or so new startups could do just that.

We were intrigued by his latest ideas, but even more so by how he conjures them, culls them, and inspires a team to nurture them. Just what, we wondered, goes on inside the head of this quintessential American inventor?

[via - CNN.Money]

Daylight Savings Time Arrives Next Weekend

2007-10-28T10:22:00.000-07:00

“Fall Back” Time Changed by Energy Bill

Daylight savings time is tardy this year, arriving one week later than usual, on Sunday Nov. 4. The extension is the result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, to lengthen the daylight-saving time period, starting in 2007.

Among other provisions, the bill attempts to combat growing energy problems by changing the start and end dates of daylight savings time. Delaying the announced time of sunrise and sunset increases the use of artificial light in the morning and reduces it in the evening. It is presumed that more people need evening light than morning light, and energy is conserved if the evening reduction outweighs the morning increase. Despite this theory, however, many question whether daylight saving results in a net energy savings.

Believer or not, next weekend you’ll get that extra hour of sleep.

Matchmaking May Be An Old Concept But It Still Makes Money

2007-10-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

Tal Golan knew he invented potentially game-changing technology in the fight against spam. Proving that to investors was a different story.

While venture capitalists in 2003 were intrigued by Mr. Golan's product, a hardware box that checks for spam before the message reaches corporate email servers, they kept telling him the same thing: He lacked the right pedigree for an investment.

"I didn't have the right degree. I didn't work for five years at Cisco and Oracle, then start up three companies," said Mr. Golan, who previously founded a small software development and consulting firm. "The reality is that VCs invest in people first, second and third, then the technology."

Undeterred, Mr. Golan operated out of his garage in Costa Mesa, Calif., for three years and invested roughly $750,000 in his company, Sendio Inc., by maxing out credit cards and refinancing his mortgage, betting the financial security of his wife and young children. By late 2005, the device was selling, but it was clear he needed to take his business to the next level. That is when he linked up with Momentum Venture Management LLC, an unconventional firm that promised to give him the credibility needed to court VCs.

Matt Ridenour and Andy Wilson, veteran start-up executives, incorporated Momentum in late 2004 to work full time with company founders to shape their business plan, find credible management, finish a product and gain customers -- a process that typically takes them about nine months to complete. At that point, they shop the company to VCs with hopes of securing a Series A round of between $4 million and $5 million.

Momentum is one of several firms that have cropped up in recent years to fill a funding void left by VC firms shifting their investments downstream and bypassing the traditional guy in a garage. That shift left many unseasoned entrepreneurs such as Mr. Golan to fend for themselves in bringing intelligent ideas to fruition. But it is also opening up an opportunity for smaller firms willing to take on higher risk and lend more credibility than do traditional angels.

"If you're an entrepreneur, seed and Series A deals are really tough to get right now," said Beau Laskey, a managing director at Burbank, Calif., early-stage firm Steamboat Ventures. "Venture firms are looking for customers and traction."

Los Angeles-based Momentum has a distinctive model that dedicates far more time than a typical angel or seed-stage investor would, while also assuming considerable risk. Momentum first spends about six weeks -- usually for a fee of less than $20,000 -- validating a business plan, confirming the chemistry with the founding team and completing due diligence before committing to the start-up.

Upon approval, one of three Momentum partners then installs himself as the chief executive officer, moving the founder to the role of chief technology officer and eventually bringing on a new CEO a few months later. At some point during the process, Momentum provides a bridge loan -- typically $250,000 to $500,000 taken from a small bridge fund pooled from wealthy individuals -- to keep the company going, all for a "nominal" monthly stipend.

"We're solving an intractable problem in the early-stage business ecosystem," Mr. Wilson, Momentum's managing director, said. "Entrepreneurs are often stuck in that vicious business cycle of needing money to recruit business talent, build a product and attract customers, yet they can't raise the money unless they have those pieces in place."

Typically a Momentum partner works with two companies at a time, spending half of his time on each, with an operating associate subbing as a project manager and director of operations. Momentum's ultimate goal is to deliver the company to venture capitalists and secure that first round of capital, when the firm's bridge investment converts, often at a discount, into Series A preferred stock. It is at this point the firm gets paid for its work after having deferred the majority of its management fees during the previous nine months.

Longtime venture capitalist Lou Volpe, a managing general partner at Waltham, Mass.-based Kodiak Venture Partners, believes Momentum's model is unique and would consider investing in a start-up seeded this way, but questions the firm's scalability. "Whipping a company into shape, enforcing operating discipline and building an executive team takes a lot of energy and time," Mr. Volpe said. "These guys are going to be limited with their scale."

Thus far, the firm has taken all seven of its start-ups to the Series A level, focusing on Los Angeles-area technology companies that require less than $10 million in funding to break even on a cash-flow basis. The seven have raised a total of $30 million in Series A funding from venture capitalists. The firm had its first exit in 2006 when Discovery Communications Inc. acquired Academy123 Inc., which had raised a $5 million Series A round the year after Momentum brought the company to venture firms Arcturus Capital and Hanseatic Group.

For Mr. Golan, it took about 10 months to get Sendio through the Momentum-coached process and into the hands of VC investor Kline Hawkes & Co., which provided $4 million in Series A capital in October 2006. Sendio now has about 275 customers. Earlier this year, it estimated it would have 1,500 customers and sell $7.8 million of product by the end of 2007.

Before linking up with Momentum, Mr. Golan said, he pitched his plan to angel coalitions, but found them as unwieldy as investors. "You have to make like 100 presentations to 100 guys and the only thing that qualifies them is money," Mr. Golan said. "It's kind of like 'American Idol.' You make the pitch, move on to the next round, and try to get 10 people to agree on everything. I'd rather take the risk on the credit card than have to deal with angels."

Klaus Koch, a Kline Hawkes investor who led the firm's investment in Sendio, said a firm like Momentum is especially beneficial to VCs because it is bringing only companies with proven business models and customers.

"Momentum comes in and takes out the significant risk," Mr. Koch said. "They're pitching us with all the information we need and cleaning up the legal issues. They really understand what a VC wants, and for a firm like us that manages $270 million, that's very valuable."

[via - StartupJournal]

Content Syndication As A Business

2007-10-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

Media organizations increasingly rely on syndicated content, but access to such material typically requires expensive subscriptions or syndication deals. New York-based Mochila has devised a way to offer articles, photos, audio and videos a la carte while dispensing with subscription fees and protecting authors' rights.

Launched earlier this year, Mochila's website is essentially an online marketplace for content. Sellers offer up their wares along with price and any restrictions; buyers search for what they need and choose the best match. Content can be instantly downloaded into any publishing system, and purchases can be made in two ways: either by paying the price set by the original content owner, or by agreeing to post advertising along with the item, in which case the content is free. In the ad-supported arrangement, advertising revenue is shared among the buyer, the seller and Mochila.

For sellers, the benefits include new revenue opportunities and increased exposure; for buyers, decreased operational costs, more ad pages and revenue opportunities, and the rub-off effect of big-name content are among them. More than 1,000 media organizations have joined Mochila so far, including Reuters, the Associated Press and Hearst Magazines—you can't get much bigger than that.

World media spent just under USD 2 billion on syndicated news content last year, and that figure is expected to grow to USD 3 billion by 2008, Mochila says. The time is ripe for a new content model, and it looks like this one is taking hold. How about putting a niche or curator’s spin on the concept?

[via - Springwise]

Finding new homes for pre-owned cell phones

2007-10-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

Despite the growing number of cell phone recyclers, junk drawers across the country hold 130 million cell phones each year. "Everyone perceives value in their phone; they just don't know what to do with it," says Cyrus Farudi, the 27-year-old co-founder of Flipswap.

Three years ago, Cyrus--along with brothers Sohrob, 30, and Rahmeen, 25, and friends Edo Cohen, 27, and Andrew Berman, 30--decided to tackle the problem of electronics waste. But instead of recycling cell phones, they put them back into use. Their program, now used by 2,500 retailers nationwide and available at cellphonetradeins.com, offers consumers cash for trading in their old phones.

More than 15,000 units a month are shipped to Flipswap in Torrance, California, inspected and then sold to companies that sell them back to consumers, most of whom are overseas. The entrepreneurs, who project $12 million in sales this year, have since added iPods to the mix and plan to start "flipswapping" other electronics soon.

[via - Entrepreneur]

How To Turn $60 Into $1000 In Three Months With Domain Names

2007-10-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting story about 'renegade webopreneur' who turned sixty dollars into a thousand bucks as a 'domain profiteer' I just received via e-mail. Most likely, we'll see more and more stories like that. Here is why:

The smart investors with big money are now jumping into this market. You should know that Ross Perot's Perot Investments, Inc. and Howard Schultz's (Chairman of Starbucks Corp.) Maveron LLC have each invested millions of dollars into companies that are buying domain names today for income and future profit. You know these guys are not going to put millions of dollars at risk on a whim.

Richard Rosenblatt has created and sold $1.3 billion dollars of Internet companies including iMALL which he founded, ran and sold for $565 million, and MySpace which he turned around as Chairman and sold for $580 million. He's raised over $200 million to invest in his domain business.

With major players like Perot, Schultz and Rosenblatt writing multi-million dollar checks, you don't have to worry about this being some fly-by-night deal. We're talking about a serious - incredibly profitable business - that's exploding across the Internet. Just one portion (according to Red Herring magazine) has exploded from $400 million in 2006 to a projected $1 billion in 2007!

Sweetest Day - National Holiday Founded in Cleveland

2007-10-20T16:45:00.000-07:00

Sweetest Day, observed on the third Saturday of October, was started in Cleveland in 1922 by candy employee and philanthropist, Herbert Birch Kingston as a way to give something or do something nice to those less fortunate than ourselves. Originally called "The Sweetest Day of the Year," Sweetest Day has evolved into a romantic holiday, similar to Valentine's Day.

History:

The first Sweetest Day came out of one man's desire to do something "sweet" for Cleveland's orphans and unfortunate residents. With the help of movie stars, Theda Bara and Ann Pennington, Herbert Birch Kingston, delivered thousands of boxes of candy throughout the city. Begun in 1922, the holiday, observed on the third Saturday of each month, became popular during the bleak economic times of the Great Depression.

Sweetest Day Today:

Although it started as a regional holiday, Clevelanders have taken the custom with them as they moved around the country. Today, Ohio still tops the list in sales of Sweetest Day cards, but other states on the top ten list include California, Texas, and Florida. Over the years, the holiday has evolved into a day to celebrate romantic love, similar to Valentine's Day.

What to Do for Sweetest Day:

Typical Sweetest Day activities include going out to dinner at a special restaurant or giving chocolates, flowers, or greeting cards. Indeed anything "special" is an apt gift or activity for Sweetest Day.

[via - Sandy Mitchell]

J.K. Rowling outs Hogwarts character

2007-10-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK — Harry Potter fans, the rumors are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay. J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall.

After reading briefly from the final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," she took questions from audience members.

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds "true love."

"Dumbledore is gay," the author responded to gasps and applause.

She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. "Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling said of Dumbledore's feelings, adding that Dumbledore was "horribly, terribly let down."

Dumbledore's love, she observed, was his "great tragedy."

"Oh, my god," Rowling concluded with a laugh, "the fan fiction."

Potter readers on fan sites and elsewhere on the Internet have speculated on the sexuality of Dumbledore, noting that he has no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past. And explicit scenes with Dumbledore already have appeared in fan fiction.

Rowling told the audience that while working on the planned sixth Potter film, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," she spotted a reference in the script to a girl who once was of interest to Dumbledore. A note was duly passed to director David Yates, revealing the truth about her character.

Rowling, finishing a brief "Open Book Tour" of the United States, her first tour here since 2000, also said that she regarded her Potter books as a "prolonged argument for tolerance" and urged her fans to "question authority."

Not everyone likes her work, Rowling said, likely referring to Christian groups that have alleged the books promote witchcraft. Her news about Dumbledore, she said, will give them one more reason.

[via - HILLEL ITALIE]

Gmail Mobile 1.5, Java Application - Released

2007-10-15T16:02:00.001-07:00

Google launched a new version for Gmail Mobile Java application for mobile phones.
If you go to gmail.com/app, on your Java-enable mobile phone and download the small application, you'll be able to use Gmail, almost as easy as on your desktop.

Gmail Mobile 1.5 makes it easier to access your contacts by adding an option in the menu. If you click on a contact, you'll see the same information available in Gmail's desktop interface: a photo, the email addresses, the phone numbers and other notes. If you entered the phone number in your contact's details, you can call him directly from Gmail.

Some key features:

Up to five times faster access and use, thanks to automatic pre-fetching of messages

Drastically reduced clicks and scrolling to access email

Fewer keystrokes for reading, composing, or searching mail

Attachments, including files and photos, viewable and automatically resized to fit the user's phone

The application lets you save an unfinished message for sending it later. The weird thing is that the message is saved on your phone, not in Drafts, and you can only have one unfinished message at any given time.

If you care about your Internet traffic, Gmail shows the bandwidth usage every time it loads data. There's also an option for encrypting your traffic, but this is not recommended because it slows down the app.

But the most surprising feature (if you can call this a feature) is the thing that helped Hotmail grow, but it's still a big annoyance in the free versions of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail: the ad automatically added at the end of your message. Gmail Mobile 1.5 appends by default to your message:

"Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com"

Fortunately, you can disable Google's promotional message by going to the settings and unchecking the last option.

Gmail Mobile 1.5 seems to have a worse performance than the previous versions and it's still incompatible with Google Apps accounts. This release is currently available only in English.

You should check the requirements, the most important being J2ME (Java) MIDP2. Gmail Mobile is also available from your browser if you go to gmail.com (or m.gmail.com) on your mobile phone, but you won't get these features.

[via - Dotoca.net]

"Mansion Madam" Arrested on Drug Charges

2007-10-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

Lisa Ann Taylor, who gained notoriety earlier
this year after she was indicted for allegedly running a house of prostitution in her upscale Atlanta subdivision, has been arrested on drug charges.

Her lawyer, Max Richardson, says Taylor is in the Gwinnett County jail Saturday.

She was arrested Friday on three felony drug
charges and one misdemeanor charge and is being held in lieu of a $2,300 bond.

Taylor and Nicole Probert became known as the "mansion madams" and gained national attention when they were charged with running a
house of prostitution at Taylor's home in the Sugarloaf Country Club subdivision in Gwinnett County.

Their trial is scheduled for February. Both women have pleaded not guilty to those charges.

The Associated Press Contributed to this story.

[via - 13wmaz]

Are we missing a dimension of time?

2007-10-11T15:41:00.000-07:00

Could "hypertime" help develop a theory of everything? Roger Highfield reports

A scientist has put forward the bizarre suggestion that there are two dimensions of time, not the one that we are all familiar with, and even proposed a way to test his heretical idea next year.

Time is no longer a simple line from the past to the future, in a four dimensional world consisting of three dimensions of space and one of time. Instead, the physicist envisages the passage of history as curves embedded in a six dimensionals, with four of space and two of time.

"There isn't just one dimension of time," Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles tells New Scientist. "There are two. One whole dimension of time and another of space have until now gone entirely unnoticed by us."

Bars claims his theory of "two time physics", which he has developed over more than a decade, can help solve problems with current theories of the cosmos and, crucially, has true predictive power that can be tested in a forthcoming particle physics experiment.

If it is confirmed, it could point the way to a "theory of everything" that unites all the physical laws of the universe into one, notably general relativity that governs gravity and the large scale structure of the universe, and quantum theory that rules the subatomic world.

In the quest for that all embracing theory, scientists have been adding extra dimensions of space to their equations for decades. As early as the 1920s, mathematicians found that moving up to four dimensions of space, instead of the three we experience, helped in their quest to reconcile theories of electromagnetism and gravity.

Today, theoreticians are studying a theory of everything called M-theory that adds yet another dimension, taking the total to 11: 10 of space and one of time.

Until now, they have been reluctant to meddle with time because it can lead to unexpected consequences, such as time travel.

Changing our picture of time from a line to a plane (one to two dimensions) means that the path between the past and future could loop back on itself, allowing you to travel back and forwards in time and allowing the famous grandfather paradox, where you could go back and kill your grandfather before your mother was born, thereby preventing your own birth.

Bars first found hints of an extra time dimension in M-theory in 1995 and, when he looked into it, discovered the grandfather paradox and other fears could be overcome by using a new kind of symmetry - a mathematical property to work out the relationship between the quantities of position and momentum. It is this symmetry that might help reconcile the two mighty pillars of 20th-century physics, quantum mechanics and relativity.

Simply adding an extra dimension of time doesn't solve everything, however. To produce equations that work with the new symmetry that describe the world accurately, an additional dimension of space is needed as well, giving a total of four space dimensions, he explained in the journal Physical Review D.

According to Bars, the familiar four dimensional world we see around us is merely a "shadow" of the six-dimensional reality, just as a hand makes many different shadows on a wall when lit from different angles.

Although we cannot experience the extra time dimension directly, we can effectively notice it through the different perspectives of the different "shadows".

In this sense, he points to already existing evidence of physical phenomena at both macroscopic and microscopic scales. Furthermore, he believes that more evidence for his theory could emerge next year, when particles are smashed together in CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland to create hitherto unseen "supersymmetric" particles.

The work poses a question: is his proposal a mathematical fix, rather than a real physical entity?

Bars insists his extra dimensions are more than mathematical sleight of hand. "Absolutely not," he told New Scientist. "These extra dimensions are out there, as real as the three dimensions of space and one of time we experience directly."

[via - telegraf.co.uk]

Prosecutors say Stripper Mechele Linehan Followed Movie Plot to Kill Fiance

2007-10-11T15:22:00.000-07:00

AP Photo/Al Grillo

A murder case in Alaska is the forum for a real-life drama that ended in the killing of stripper Mechele Linehan's fiance at the time.

Mechele Linehan is on trial for masterminding the murder, where prosecutors say Linehan followed the plot in the film "The Last Seduction," where a female character talked her lover into murdering her husband for cash. Prosecutors claim Linehan was obsessed with the film and followed the script to the end, including the murder of 36-year-old fisherman Kent Leppink.

Prosecutors also say the motive for the murder was the life insurance policy of Leppink, which was for $1 million. What she didn't know is Leppink was suspicious and made his parents the beneficiaries only days before he was murdered.

Leppink's body was discovered on the ground by utility workers, having been shot three times with a .44 Magnum.

Actress Linda Fiorentino, who played the role of the femme fatale in the film said, "Isn't it unbelievable? I'm a little shaken up by it."

John Carlin III, who was another fiance of Linehan's, was convicted of murdering Leppink in April.

The case broke when Carlin's son gave testimony that he had seen his dad wash the murder weapon with bleach in a sink while Lineman looked on. He wasn't able to testify originally because he was underage at the time, and wasn't allowed to be his father.

8 Simple Ways to Enjoy Life Every Day

2007-10-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

In The Magic of Starting Small, I made the point that it is your days that define your life. In this article, I want to challenge the common perception that it is only possible to enjoy your leisure time. In particular, this article is targeted at the professional stuck in the 9 to 5 grind who longs for the weekend and, in the process, has given up on trying to find pleasure in the ordinary experiences we have every day.

1. Appreciate Beauty

Each day we come across beauty in a number of shapes and forms. It’s a shame, then, that many people have become so accustomed to this beauty that it largely goes unappreciated. I suggest looking again at the people, plants, gadgets, and buildings (to name but a few examples) around you and taking a moment to appreciate what makes them so special.

2. Connect With Nature

Nature is an amazing healer for the stresses and strains of modern life. Eating lunch in the park, attending to a vegetable garden in your backyard, or watching the sunset are just a few simple ideas for how you can enjoy the outdoors on a daily basis.

3. Laugh

E. E. Cummings once said “the most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” How very true. Never be too busy to laugh, or too serious to smile. Instead, surround yourself with fun people and don’t get caught up in your own sense of importance.

4. Have Simple Pleasures

A good cup of coffee when I first wake. Time spent playing with my 8 month old son. Cooking a nice meal in the evening. These may not seem terribly exciting, but they are some of the simple pleasures I enjoy in life. If you slow down for just a moment and take the time to appreciate these ordinary events, life becomes instantly more enjoyable.

5. Connect With People

In so many ways, it is our relationships with people that give us the most happiness in life. Perhaps, then, the best way to enjoy your work more is not to get a raise or a promotion, but rather to build rewarding relationships with your co-workers.

6. Learn

There is a strong link between learning and happiness. Given this, there is no excuse not to be stimulating your brain and learning something new each day. My favorite way to find time for learning is to make the most of the commute to and from work. Audiobooks and podcasts are great for this purpose.

7. Rethink Your Mornings and Evenings

Are the mornings a mad rush for you to get out the door? Do you switch off the TV at night and go straight to bed? I have personally experienced the profound benefits of establishing a routine in the morning and evening. For example, in the morning you may choose to wake an hour earlier and spend the time working on yourself, whether it be reading, writing or exercising. In the evening, consider spending some time just before bed reviewing your day or in meditation.

8. Celebrate Your Successes

During a normal day we are sure to have some minor successes. Perhaps you have successfully dealt with a difficult customer, made a sale, or received a nice compliment for your work. These aren’t events worth throwing a party for, but why not take a moment to celebrate your success? Share the experience with someone else, reward yourself with a nice lunch, or just give yourself a mental pat on the back.

[VIA - pickthebrain.com]

who this man?

2007-10-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

that he did the finger?

The Army of Mary cast out by Vatican

2007-09-27T14:33:00.001-07:00

Calling it a "very grave situation," the Vatican has excommunicated members of a controversial Quebec Catholic movement, the Army of Mary, for their heretical beliefs that derive from the writings of Marie-Paule Giguère, an 86-year-old mystic who claims to be a reincarnation of the Virgin Mary.

In a judgment delivered to the group on Monday, and announced yesterday, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ruled that the ordinations of six priests in the Army of Mary this past June were illegitimate, because they were performed by a priest rather than a bishop. As a result, at least one recent marriage, performed by one of these new priests, is now regarded by the Vatican as null.

Further, the ruling says that anyone who participates in the Army of Mary, which has centres in Quebec City and Lac-Etchemin, Que., is in schism with the Catholic Church, and therefore automatically excommunicated.

The group has been in conflict with the Vatican for at least 20 years - its members claim to be fully Catholic, but with extra beliefs - and so it received the ruling with equanimity, calling it the "will of God."

"In 1958, our foundress received from above, heard from above that she would be crucified by priests and bishops. It's only the realization today of such a message," said Father Eric Roy, Superior General of the Sons of Mary and a leading figure in the group. "We cannot go against our conscience."

Founded as a prayer group in 1971, and recognized by the Archbishop of Quebec four years later, the Army of Mary has been a headache for Canadian Catholic bishops ever since.

In her writings, Mme. Giguère described visions and messages she received from God, explaining that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is fully divine, and also that, as her modern incarnation, so is Mme. Giguère. Rather than the traditional Catholic Trinity - in which God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are each fully divine and part of a three-part deity - the Army of Mary now speaks of a "quinternity," including Mary and Mme. Giguère.

This reverence of the charismatic Mme. Giguère, and the inevitable comparisons to Joan of Arc and Teresa of Avila, helped it to spread beyond Quebec, with missions across Canada and in France, the United States, Austria, Jamaica and Italy. At one time it claimed 20,000 members, but that number is now far lower, although Fr. Roy would not estimate.

"There was always this suspicion that was around them, that they were doing something on the side, you know, teaching other things. It was always hard to tie them down, and I just tried to get them to come out and admit things," said Terrence Prendergast, Archbishop of Ottawa, who was appointed in 2003 by Pope John Paul II to be a mediator in the dispute.

"They would say that they would not subscribe to some of the limitations that we would put on the creed.

"They would say we hold everything that the Roman Catholic Church teaches, and then some things that the Church is not yet ready for," he said.

Yesterday, he criticized the belief that God has somehow willed their excommunication, which he called "victim theology."

"It's one of those ironies that they have been waiting for this and hoping for it. And probably their foundress has predicted it [but] I would have to find out after the fact, because that's usually when we find out that she's predicted something," he said. After 9/11, for example, she claimed to have envisioned the falling towers several years previously.

"The Church has been very patient with them. I've been very patient with them," Archbishop Prendergast said. "It's a kind of cult. I think they are very much under the sway of the foundress. Whatever she says counts for more important than what the Pope says."

Archbishop Prendergast's predecessor, Bishop Gilles Cazabon, had tried for five years to resolve the schism and made little progress.

In fact, until this week, things stood pretty much as they were 20 years ago, when in 1987 the late Cardinal Louis-Albert Vachon revoked the Army of Mary's status as a Catholic organization, which was meant as a warning of future excommunication. In 1999, Bishop Cazabon was appointed as Pontifical Commissioner, a sort of Papal envoy, but things remained stalled until 2001, when the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a doctrinal note in 2001 stating that the Army of Mary is not a "Catholic association."

Since then, Archbishop Prendergast said, the group's status has fallen among mainstream Catholics, and so the trend among Army of Mary devotees outside of Quebec has been to either recant their heretical beliefs and become fully Catholic, or to return to Quebec.

Things came to a crisis this June, however, when a leading Army of Mary priest called Father Jean-Pierre Mastropietro ordained six new priests, including a father and son. Under canon law, only a bishop can ordain priests.

"He simply accepted Marie-Paule Giguère's idea that you are now appointed to be Father John of the Church of John," Archbishop Prendergast said. "He calls the Church of Rome the 'Church of Peter' [Peter was the first pope and one of Jesus' 12 apostles]. And the Church of Peter, which is the Church of Authority I guess, is being 'transmutated' - that's the term they use - into the Church of John, the Church of Love. And that's where, of course, the Catholic Church can't agree."
He said he regrets the failure of the efforts at reconciliation, because most of the Army of Mary's priests - there are 39 at the Lac-Etchemin centre, for example, in addition to brothers and sisters of the order - are legitimately ordained, one even by the late Pope John Paul II.

But now that Fr. Mastropietro is wearing a Byzantine crown and "acting like a pope" himself, the final line has been crossed.

"I did my very best with these men," Archbishop Prendergast said.

"I like them. I would like them to be Catholic priests. We need Catholic priests, but we have to have Catholic priests who obey what the bishops say ... [But] once you decide Heaven can tell you what to do, it can tell you all kinds of things that go beyond the boundaries."

[via - canada.com]

Hands-on with the Palm Centro

2007-09-27T14:12:00.000-07:00

Shortly after Ed Colligan himself talked up Palm's latest Palm OS-based handset, we had the opportunity to check it out. It's small, it's bright red (or black, if that's your thing), and it's got a speedy EV-DO connection -- but is it the best Palm OS device ever?
Check it out!

[via - ENGadget]

Mom births her 12th baby — 17-pound Nadia

2007-09-27T14:02:00.000-07:00

Siberian woman unaware of newborn’s weight until Caesarean section

BARNAUL, Russia - A Siberian woman who gave birth to her 12th child — doing more than her fair share to stem Russia’s population decline — was stunned to find that little Nadia weighed in at a massive 17 pounds, 1 ounce.

Nadia was delivered by Caesarean section in the local maternity hospital in the Altai region on September 17, joining eight sisters and three brothers, a local reporter said.

“We were all simply in shock,” said Nadia’s mother, Tatyana Barabanova, 43. “What did the father say? He couldn’t say a thing — he just stood there blinking.”

“I ate everything, we don’t have the money for special foods so I just ate potatoes, noodles and tomatoes,” she told the reporter, adding that all her previous babies had weighed more than 11 pounds.

The Guinness World Records lists a 22 pound, 4 ounce baby boy born in Italy in 1955, and a 23 pound, 8 ounce baby boy who was born in the United States in 1879 but died 11 hours later.

The average weight for most healthy newborn babies is around 7 pounds, 6 ounces, according to World Health Organization figures.

[via - msnbc]

Ten Timeless Persuasive Writing Techniques

2007-09-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

Want to convince your readers to do something or agree with your point of view?

OK, that was a silly question. Of course you do.

Persuasion is generally an exercise in creating a win-win situation. You present a case that others find beneficial to agree with. You make them an offer they can’t refuse, but not in the manipulative Godfather sense.

It’s simply a good deal or a position that makes sense to that particular person.

But there are techniques that can make your job easier and your case more compelling. While this list is in no way comprehensive, these 10 strategies are used quite a bit because they work.

Repetition

Talk to anyone well versed in learning psychology, and they’ll tell you repetition is crucial. It’s also critical in persuasive writing, since a person can’t agree with you if they don’t truly get what you’re saying.

Of course, there’s good repetition and bad. To stay on the good side, make your point in several different ways, such as directly, using an example, in a story, via a quote from a famous person, and once more in your summary.
Reasons Why

Remember the power of the word because. Psychological studies have shown that people are more likely to comply with a request if you simply give them a reason why… even if that reason makes no sense.

The strategy itself does make sense if you think about it. We don’t like to be told things or asked to take action without a reasonable explanation. When you need people to be receptive to your line of thinking, always give reasons why.
Consistency

It’s been called the “hobgoblin of little minds,” but consistency in our thoughts and actions is a valued social trait. We don’t want to appear inconsistent, since, whether fair or not, that characteristic is associated with instability and flightiness, while consistency is associated with integrity and rational behavior.

Use this in your writing by getting the reader to agree with something up front that most people would have a hard time disagreeing with. Then rigorously make your case, with plenty of supporting evidence, all while relating your ultimate point back to the opening scenario that’s already been accepted.

Social Proof

Looking for guidance from others as to what to do and what to accept is one of the most powerful psychological forces in our lives. It can determine whether we deliver aid to a person in need, and it can determine whether we muster the courage to kill ourselves.

Obvious examples of social proof can be found in testimonials and outside referrals, and it’s the driving force behind social media. But you can also casually integrate elements of social proof in your writing, ranging from skillful alignment with outside authorities to blatant name dropping.
Comparisons

Metaphors, similes and analogies are the persuasive writer’s best friends. When you can relate your scenario to something that the reader already accepts as true, you’re well on your way to convincing someone to see things your way.

But comparisons work in other ways too. Sometimes you can be more persuasive by comparing apples to oranges (to use a tired but effective metaphor). Don’t compare the price of your home study course to the price of a similar course—compare it to the price of a live seminar or your hourly consulting rate.

Agitate and Solve

This is a persuasion theme that works as an overall approach to making your case. First, you identify the problem and qualify your audience. Then you agitate the reader’s pain before offering your solution as the answer that will make it all better.

The agitation phase is not about being sadistic; it’s about empathy. You want the reader to know unequivocally that you understand his problem because you’ve dealt with it and/or are experienced at eliminating it. The credibility of your solution goes way up if you demonstrate that you truly feel the prospect’s pain.
Prognosticate

Another persuasion theme involves providing your readers with a glimpse into the future. If you can convincingly present an extrapolation of current events into likely future outcomes, you may as well have a license to print money.

This entire strategy is built on credibility. If you have no idea what you’re talking about, you’ll end up looking foolish. But if you can back up your claims with your credentials or your obvious grasp of the subject matter, this is an extremely persuasive technique.

Go Tribal

Despite our attempts to be sophisticated, evolved beings, we humans are exclusionary by nature. Give someone a chance to be a part of a group that they want to be in—whether that be wealthy, or hip, or green, or even contrarian—and they’ll hop on board whatever train you’re driving.

This is the technique used in the greatest sales letter ever written. Find out what group people want to be in, and offer them an invitation to join while seemingly excluding others.
Address Objections

If you present your case and someone is left thinking “yeah, but…”, well, you’ve lost. This is why direct marketers use long copy—it’s not that they want you to read it all, it’s that they want you to read enough until you buy.

Addressing all the potential objections of at least the majority of your readers can be tough, but if you really know your subject the arguments against you should be fairly obvious. If you think there are no reasonable objections to your position, you’re in for a shock if you have comments enabled.

Storytelling

Storytelling is really a catch-all technique—you can and should use it in combination with any and all of the previous nine strategies. But the reason why storytelling works so well lies at the heart of what persuasion really is.

Stories allow people to persuade themselves, and that’s what it’s really all about. You might say that we never convince anyone of anything—we simply help others independently decide that we’re right. Do everything you can to tell better stories, and you’ll find that you are a terribly persuasive person.

As I mentioned, this is in no way a complete list. What other persuasive writing strategies work for you?

[via - copyblogger]

Why You Should Not Be Ashamed Of Being Home Based

2007-09-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

LYNNE KILLEY followed the advice books when she opened a spa and started producing a line of natural skin care products out of her home in Pagosa Springs, Colo.: she tried to make her one-woman operation look bigger.

“I referred to the company in the third person,” she said. “I made a logo, Stella, and sometimes billed things out under Stella’s name.”

Then, last summer, Ms. Killey’s publicist organized a trip to New York so she could meet with magazine editors. In describing her business, Queen Bee Skin Care, Ms. Killey revealed that she made her products in her own kitchen. Even as she spoke, she said, she realized that perhaps her home-based model was a selling point and not something to hide.

“Here I was sitting in front of people that I needed to impress, and they just loved that I was making the stuff in my kitchen,” she said. Right about then, she rethought her strategy.

With about 50 percent of businesses in the United States based out of the home, this kind of transparency is likely to become more common. “Place honestly doesn’t matter anymore,” said Maggie Jackson, author of “What’s Happening to Home” (Sorin Books 2002).

“It is no longer a faux pas to have a life at the other end of the telephone line.” Ms. Jackson said. “It can make you feel like you’re dealing with a holistic person. And it is just another sign that we are moving away from the industrial age in that we no longer have two totally separate spheres called work and home.”

Just as customers, vendors and other outsiders are getting a chance to peek behind the curtain into home offices, home-based entrepreneurs are also getting more opportunities to interact with each other. StartupNation, an online hub for small businesses, is running a contest, the Home-Based 100, that will rank home-based businesses according to various criteria, including “the top financial performers,” “the greenest,” “the wackiest” and “boomers back in business.”

“Home-based businesses are out of the hiding part, but when we talk about business, we still talk about the Fortune 500, but not the half-trillion dollar economy of home-based businesses,” said Richard Sloan, co-founder of StartupNation. “This new community will also allow home-based businesses to connect with each other, get inspired and share best practices.”

Chris Elam, the founder and choreographer of Misnomer Dance Theater, runs the company out of his Brooklyn apartment, and he is a big proponent of transparency. His company videotapes rehearsals and even office meetings for posting on its video blog, which allows audiences to get a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to run a dance company.

“Dance audiences traditionally interact with a dance company for only two hours a year and maybe get a couple of postcards,” Mr. Elam said. “But so much happens outside the performance, and we are trying to find ways of making the whole function of the company more open-source.”

Margot J. Tohn is another home-based business owner who thinks there is no point in hiding. Her decision to start a publishing business came after a disastrous evening of trying to find parking in the theater district in Manhattan. She thought she would write a book about finding parking in New York, and since she was staying in her childhood home in Larchmont, N.Y., it made sense to start her business there to keep her start-up costs low. She could also store books in the garage.

The book, “Park It! NYC”, is now in its second edition. She also works as a consultant for small financial advisers serving affluent families.

Around the same time she started her business, Ms. Tohn, 43, and her two sisters bought the house from their parents, who had moved to Florida for their retirement. Even with this rather unusual housing arrangement, Ms. Tohn says she has found that being candid often worked to her advantage.

“If the local bookstore runs out of my book, I can easily run some over,” she said. “My consulting clients know that I am unusually accessible. It isn’t uncommon for a client to call at 8 or 9 in the evening. It used to happen at 7 in the morning, but we put a stop to that.”

Clients also know that she often leaves the office midday to play tennis or tend to her garden, and leaves the cellphone behind. “When you start work 10 minutes after waking up, it’s healthy to take real breaks.”

Still, Ms. Tohn does not want to confuse her openness with a lack of professionalism. When she brings in a team of interns to help with a project, she sets them up in dining room where everyone can spread out around the table. “It’s all about creating a separate area from where I live,” she said.

She is also a stickler about noise. “I’ve learned from watching my two sisters keep home offices while raising their children,” she said. “When the door is shut to the office, it is shut, and they can’t be interrupted unless it’s blood or death.”

Debra M. Cohen, 40, by contrast, says she designed her business, a contractor referral service for homeowners, around the idea that she might be on the phone for business and her children might be making a ruckus in the background. Her company, Home Remedies of New York, has become so successful, she says, that she now offers consulting services to others who want to copy her business model in their communities. Ms. Cohen says she has home referral operators running her programs in nearly every state and Canada.

When exploring ideas for a business, she ran every idea through the “can it be done from home with kids underfoot” test, she said.

Working from home may allow for certain informalities, but it does not necessarily signal the size of an entrepreneur’s vision. Ms. Cohen’s business passed the million-dollar revenue mark four years after its founding. Bradley Rhine, 46, who works out of his home in San Jose, Calif., is a chief executive of Cogentes, a virtual consulting firm specializing in the information technology industry. Cogentes plans to hire 100 to 200 employees over the next several years.

The company has nine employees, in Atlanta, San Jose and Boston, and as it expands it does not consider where a person lives. “Our ongoing proposition as to find the best people wherever they are,” Mr. Rhine said.

He said his firm’s business model makes sense because it is now possible to outsource many aspects of a business’s operations. The company uses outside firms for payroll, benefits, human resources, recruiting and marketing.

No one commutes, and everyone can live where they want, he said. “It is just a ridiculous waste of time and resources. It is both wasteful and stressful,” he added. “Plus, it is bad for the environment.”

[via - NY Times]

Joe Sugarman's Triggers - Turning Money Poop into Shinola

2007-09-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

Just as it is important to show your dirty laundry early for your prospect to see, it is equally important to clean it as well. The examples in the preceding chapter all involved first determining the negative features or the objections to the sale and then bringing them up right away.

But then comes the hard part. You’ve got to resolve the objections. For example, if I were selling a thermostat (as I mentioned in the previous example) and the prospect was required to install it, I would bring up the installation issue right away, at the beginning of the ad. I know from my experience with other sales that consumers do not relate to installation of an electrical product where live voltages and wires are involved.

By bringing up the possible objection and then resolving it, I’ve removed a major obstacle blocking the sale. In the installation example, I brought it up and then explained that the thermostat wires were only 24-volt—not enough to hurt anybody. I mentioned that the wires were all color-coded, making it easy to install.

In contrast, I’ve seen many of my competitors avoid bringing up an objection, and never resolving it either. I’ve watched their ads fail, too.

Here’s a very important point: You can’t just resolve an objection without first raising it. Let me give you an example of this from my own observations.

I was piloting my own private plane and was about 50 miles from Palwaukee airport in Wheeling, Illinois, where I was scheduled to land. The weather was perfect for flying. It was a bright, clear day—one of those rare days when you could see for miles. But the air traffic controllers were unusually quiet as I approached Palwaukee.

As I got closer to Palwaukee, I could see, off in the distance, a big fire near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. I landed my plane, parked, and walked into the airport flight office where I learned from a television broadcast that American Airlines flight 191 had just crashed on takeoff from O’Hare and that all its passengers had died.

That was May 25, 1979, and it was one of those memories that remain indelibly etched in my mind. The plane that crashed was a DC-10—one of McDonnell Douglas’s largest and most popular aircrafts. Immediately after the crash, it was determined that there was a hydraulic problem that, under certain circumstances, could cause loss of control and consequently a crash. McDonnell Douglas quickly corrected the problem, but for a while all DC-10s were grounded.

As if that wasn’t enough, the DC-10 was involved in two more crashes within a relatively short period of time. The last two were not related to any fault of the airplane, but the stigma of the American Airlines crash was still on the minds of the public. McDonnell Douglas realized that it had to do something to offset the negative publicity.

They picked Pete Conrad, a former astronaut, to write an advertisement and address the public concern. But instead of raising the issue of the plane crashes (as you would an objection) and then resolving it, the objection was totally ignored. The resulting ad was hollow. It talked about how safe the DC-10 was and how it was built to exacting standards and how 18 million engineering man-hours had been invested in the plane’s development. It went on and on. What was missing was the simple sentences, “No doubt you’ve heard of the recent series of DC-10 crashes. Well, there’s a few things you should know.”

I would then have brought out a number of things. First, that an unusual circumstance involving the hydraulic system caused the crash. Second, I would have explained what had been done to fix it and then gone on to reestablish trust in the plane’s safety by explaining the inspections and recently installed fail-safe systems.

In short, I would bring up the objections—thoughts that would come up in consumers’ minds—and then resolve them through the proactive measures that were already being taken.

Then I would say the things Pete Conrad said in his ad. Instead, the entire ad was focused on resolving perceived objections about the quality of construction of the plane, when that wasn’t what was on the minds of readers. Although Conrad resolved the issue of quality construction of the DC-10, he missed a major opportunity.

You are wasting your time resolving any objection unless you raise it first. And if you don’t raise the real objections that your prospects have in their minds, then you’re totally wasting your time.

The ad agency that created the DC-10 ad and the company who approved it may have had a different purpose in running their ad—more from a legal angle than from a marketing sense. But the ad nevertheless clearly failed to accomplish its intended purpose.

In the selling process, it is important to bring out an objection very early in the sales
presentation. It is equally, if not more, important to figure out a strategy for resolving the objection. By so doing, you solidly anticipate the resistance to your sales pitch and quickly resolve that resistance while getting respect from your prospect.
No matter what the problem is with your product or service, no matter how bad it may seem and no matter how badly you want to hide it, you must bring it to the surface early in the sales presentation and then resolve it. So the real question here is basically, “How can I take this problem and turn it into an opportunity?”

Very often, within a problem lies an opportunity so big it dwarfs the problem. Your job is to find the opportunity. Let me give you a few examples.

I was selling an ion generator. This product produced negative ions, which attached
themselves to micron-sized pollution particles and then precipitated the particles out of the air. The unit I was selling was sleek—a black, shiny cylinder with a slanted top that normally would look like a great art piece. But stuck on the very top of the unit, right in the middle of its slanted top, was this piece of metal that looked like steel wool. It was plain ugly and an eyesore. The problem was the eyesore—it did not make the unit look like it was an advanced space-age product.

The resolution was simply to title the ad, “Miracle Fuzz” and call attention to the piece of steel wool (or “fuzz” as I called it) as being the miraculous secret in the entire process. After all, it was the emitter for the ions and played a critical role in the product’s performance. The perception of the ugly fuzz was immediately transformed in the mind of the consumer from being a funny piece of steel wool into a miracle and the basis of this new appliance’s effectiveness. The ad ran for years and was one of our most popular ads.

Whenever I have come up with something I can call a problem, it triggers a reaction in my mind that says, “Where’s the opportunity?” One of the most satisfying things my customers used to tell me about my advertising was that it was totally disarming. They appreciated my raising problems with products that nobody else would consider raising and then resolving them in a completely satisfying way that transformed the problem into a major benefit.

You can do that easily in the selling process. Just list on one side of a sheet of paper the objections your prospect might have about your product. Then, on the other side, list ways you can resolve those objections and turn them into opportunities. But be careful. Here is where common sense comes into play. If you raise an objection that really isn’t much of an objection in the mind of your prospect, you are raising a red flag that doesn’t need to be raised, let alone resolved. The objections should be the serious concerns that your prospect typically will raise. It could be about competition, pricing, delivery—whatever the objection, raise it early in the sales presentation and then resolve it with a creative and proactive solution.

If your prospect raises an objection you totally didn’t expect or even realize could be a problem, you have the opportunity in the personal selling situation to resolve it right on the spot. Then, the next time you sell the same product to a new prospect, you’ll have a resolution ready for that objection if it is mentioned again. It won’t be a shock.

In my mail order ads, I had to anticipate all the objections my prospects might have, or I would not make the sale. But in personal selling you have the tremendous advantage of knowing precisely what the objection is, if indeed the prospect brings it up.

What happens when something unexpectedly bad happens during a product presentation?

The bad thing that happens then automatically assumes the role of the objection in the mind of the customer. You now have to creatively resolve it.

A good example of this happened to me in August, 1998, while I was appearing on QVC in London—an affiliate of QVC in the U.S. I was selling BluBlocker sunglasses to an English audience when my show host, Rob, decided to show how strong BluBlocker sunglasses are.

In the past, he would throw the sunglasses on the floor and then step on them with his large foot. Nothing would happen to the BluBlockers, proving how durable and strong the sunglasses really were.

On this day, something totally unexpected happened. Rob threw the BluBlockers on the floor, stepped on them with his big foot and broke a pair right at the hinge. Right there and then, as the broken pair of sunglasses lay on the floor, the objection in the minds of consumers was raised big time. But if you recall, I mentioned earlier that each problem has an opportunity and each opportunity is often much more powerful than the problem. Here’s what happened.

While Rob was literally speechless, I laughed and then said, “Rob, I’m glad you broke that pair. I really am. Lots of people watching might think that many of the demonstrations we put on here on QVC are rigged and not really truthful and here we have one that shows that indeed this is live television and that these tests aren’t rigged. Furthermore, notice where the sunglasses broke. Right at the hinge, which I’ve been saying for a long time is the weakest link in the entire pair.”

I then picked up the two pieces of BluBlockers and said, “You see the broken hinge area and how it is reinforced? Despite the reinforced hinge area, the sunglasses still broke, but this is about the only part of a pair of BluBlockers that can break and if it does, then you simply return it to the BluBlocker company and we will send you a replacement pair during our one-year warranty. Even if it is your fault.”

I used this dramatic moment to resolve several objections that were raised in the minds of consumers and maybe a few that weren’t even there but appeared as a result of a demonstration gone bad. And I resolved them promptly and quickly, proving that we were human, that we indeed were on live television, and that we back our product no matter what happens to it. We even had the opportunity to dramatically show how much reinforcement we put in the hinge area.

The broken sunglass demonstration was the talk of many of the other hosts at QVC that day, but most of the commentary was how I got out of it in a positive way.

Keep this very important story in mind when the worst thing happens in a presentation and something goes wrong. Remember that what went wrong just raised an objection and it is now time to creatively resolve it. If you do, the prospect will have much more respect for you than he or she had without the episode happening, as was my experience at QVC. In fact, sales of that particular pair of BluBlockers were greater than normal, which we directly related to the demonstration that went bad.

Resolving an objection does more than build confidence, inspire respect, and reflect your integrity. It resolves a conflict in the mind of the consumer that must be resolved to consummate a sale.
Trigger 5: Objection Resolution

[via - Triggers]

New Niche - Helping Seniors Relocate

2007-09-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

Seniors are among those most likely to move, as they downsize or head off to sunny retirement digs. Yet moves can be especially hard on them, with heavy lifting and countless details to deal with, from emptying an attic to reconnecting an entertainment system. Adrienne Simpson, founder of Smooth Mooove, has staked her claim in what could become an attractive new industry.

Like so many entrepreneurs, she recognized a business opportunity after personally discovering a need. While moving her parents from Georgia to Michigan, she searched without success for a specialized company that would be able to help. Thanks to Simpson’s hard-knocks lessons, Smooth Mooove’s clients can now choose from a lengthy menu of services within three basic moving plans.

Services range from cleaning up vacated homes once all household items have been loaded on a truck, to hanging drapes and shopping for new items for a client’s new home. Although any move is costly, Simpson says Smooth Mooove can actually save time and money. Since family members often have to take time from work to help a parent move, the company isn’t just marketing its program to seniors, but also to corporate clients, as an employee benefit for children of aging boomers.

Smooth Mooove, based in Stone Mountain, Georgia, joins a growing list of concierge-like services focused on seniors, including other moving companies that are starting to serve this market. As populations age throughout the industrialized world, the need for similar services will expand, creating plenty of room for new competitors to differentiate themselves through innovative services or by segmenting the senior market in any number of ways.

Plush retirement communities, for example, might contract with a moving service as an added inducement to buyers. In the end, the success or failure of moving companies for seniors—as with any high-touch service enterprise—will hinge on how well they manage the details. And, equally important, on the respect, consideration and care given to their clients in the process.

[via - Springwise]

How To Become A Millionaire Sawing Stage Curtains

2007-09-27T10:18:00.000-07:00

http://sewwhatinc.com/

Megan Duckett, 35
Sew What? Inc.,Rancho Dominguez, California

Projected 2007 Sales: $4.6 million
Description: Manufacturer of custom theatrical draperies and distributor of flame-retardant fabrics

Finding her way: After immigrating to the U.S. at age 19, this native Australian found work as a technician for a concert production company--and started sewing in her spare time. Her first gig was sewing fabric coffin linings for a Halloween show. "I rented a [sewing machine] and lined 10 coffins," recalls Megan Duckett. "[I discovered] that I had a talent and an ability to manipulate the fabric in a craftlike way, and I really enjoyed it." Duckett worked evenings and weekends on her craft business, and in 1997 she quit her full-time job, rented a warehouse and officially incorporated.

Building Buzz: Not one to wait for the phone to ring, Duckett used every inexpensive marketing tool she could, such as mailers, fliers and handmade business cards. She also chatted up her company's services every chance she got. "Everyone was a potential customer," she says. That grass-roots marketing led to her making draperies for theater, concerts and special events worldwide.

Creative Coverings: Manufacturing the custom draperies for Rod Stewart's latest concert tour was a highlight for Duckett. "We made about 1,500 yards of the Stewart family tartan," she says. "We made it into this enormous design that would register onstage with the audience--it was totally unique." The work of Sew What? has also graced the tours of such legends as Gwen Stefani, Prince and Fleetwood Mac, to name a few. But despite a packed schedule, she still makes time to help the community: Duckett founded From Stages to Students, a program that provides free or low-cost draperies to school theater programs and community rehabilitation centers that teach sewing.

Follow Her Lead: Chat up your new business every chance you get, as you never know where leads will come from.

[via - Enrepreneur Magazine]

Working Mother Top Ten

2007-09-26T04:34:00.000-07:00

Working Mother Top Ten

Baptist Health South Florida
Booz Allen Hamilton
Ernst & Young
General Mills
IBM
KPMG
The McGraw-Hill Companies
PricewaterhouseCoopers
UBS
Wachovia

Those who dare to climb Mount Everest battle brutal winds, freezing temperatures and dangerous paths, all because they want to reach the top of the world. Like other peak performers, our Top 10 know that it takes special qualities to reach the pinnacle of innovation in the area of family-friendly benefits—perseverance, ingenuity and courage. It also takes listening. We asked human resources execs at our Top

10 what female staffers say they need most.

The companies' responses show an unusual level of mindfulness. Whether it's cutting-edge time-off options at General Mills, a growing career development focus at KPMG or ramped-up networking opportunities at Wachovia, each of our Top 10 enacts programs that make women feel like they are being heard.

Baptist Health South Florida
Kathryn M. Fisk / Corporate Vice President, Employee Services & Human Resources
"The health-care profession asks a lot of its employees. We've heard from our working moms that they love their jobs, but they need a little extra help. We responded with our Great Place, Great People initiative and have introduced a housing benefit, special retention and appreciation bonuses and a backup child-care and elder-care service."

Booz Allen Hamilton
Horacio Rozanski / Vice President & Chief Personnel Officer
"Women at our company have been asking for flexibility—not only in work arrangements but in choices, too. We've revamped our paid-time-off structure for greater flexibility. We've created a new part-time career model, and we've introduced a series of initiatives aimed at increasing representation of women in the pipeline. We're committed to finding ways to say yes."

Ernst & Young
James L. Freer / Vice Chair of People
"This past year we heeded the advice of our women employees and enhanced our parental leave policy to include six weeks of fully paid leave for primary caregivers, in addition to six weeks of fully paid short-term disability for birthmothers. The firm also introduced the Working Moms Network to help women make the transition back to work following parental leave."

General Mills
Kelly Baker / Vice President of Corporate Diversity
"While our vacation benefits are among the best—with 90 percent of employees recommending us as a great place to work—flexibility in managing work/life balance continues to be a big concern for women when deciding where to work and whether or not to stay. We created new time-off options to help staffers maintain balance, including flex vacation and sabbaticals."

IBM
Ronald C. Glover / Vice President, Global Workforce Diversity
"Women have been asking for greater flexibility in where, when and how they get their work done. They're also asking for tools that enable them to network with colleagues, develop their skills and grow their career. To help them, we offer a range of programs, from flexible work schedules and meeting-free Fridays to online resources that identify job and learning opportunities."

KPMG
Bruce Pfau / Vice Chair, Human Resources
"Our female employees have asked for more opportunities to have meaningful discussions about their careers. This year we launched Web-based training for employees and managers to help them have more productive conversations about career development. We also introduced an interactive website to help staffers identify steps for building more satisfying careers."

The McGraw-Hill Companies
David L. Murphy / Executive Vice President, Human Resources
"We acknowledge and facilitate the powerful contributions of our female employees by providing resources such as parental leave, adoption assistance, elder-care case management and flexible work arrangements. Our rich portfolio of resources supports and addresses employees' needs at every stage of their lives, fueling their career aspirations and their personal fulfillment."

PricewaterhouseCoopers
Roy Weathers / Partner & Chief Diversity Officer
"Women want more time—whether to bond with a newborn or adjust to their role as a parent. Our leadership recognized this as an opportunity to make a significant investment in our people. As a result, effective January 1, 2007, we gave mothers three extra weeks of fully paid maternity leave, which can be used at any time up to one year following a child's birth or adoption."

UBS
Mona Lau / Global Head of Diversity
"To ensure career success for talented flex employees, we have been rolling out a Managing Flexible Workers workshop for managers globally. These programs give managers tools to support flexibility within their teams. We've also focused on ensuring that women are adequately represented in our talent pool identification and career development programs."

Wachovia
Shannon McFayden / Director, Human Resources & Corporate Relations
"Our female employees repeatedly speak to the need to connect across our organization. The company's leadership panels allow women to get advice from other women. Our affinity networking gives women a chance to connect with others who have similar interests. And our annual balance event enables women company-wide to share how they align work and life."

7 reasons to choose credit over debit

2007-09-21T13:43:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- It's a question we face daily that still leaves most of us mystified: "Debit or credit?" Here, courtesy of Consumer Reports' Money Advisor, are seven reasons to opt for credit:

Credit costs you less. Some banks charge customers for so-called in-store "PIN-based" debit-card transactions. Fees range from 25 cents to $1, depending on the bank, Money Advisor reports. By choosing a "signature-based" transaction, you sidestep these fees.
Credit won't result in a hold on your account. When you use a debit card to reserve a hotel, rent a car or even fill up your tank, vendors sometimes put a "block" on your checking account until the transaction is processed -- and the amount of the block can significantly exceed the purchase price. Using your debit card to buy $25 worth of gas, for instance, may result in $100 of the money in your account being "blocked." If you're running a low balance, this can result in punishing overdraft charges.
Credit makes it easier to cover your bases. If you haven't been keeping a close eye on your bank balance, it may be a good idea to choose the credit option on your debit card because it takes longer for the money to be debited from your account (usually around two days). This gives you a little time to make sure you have enough in your account to cover the charge.
Credit offers better rewards. While some debit cards now offer rewards, such as air miles and cash-back bonuses, credit-card rewards tend to be far more generous, according to Money Advisor.
Credit allows interest to accrue. If you religiously pay off your balance at the end of the month, you stand to make more money by paying with a no-fee credit card. Why? Because you can allow your money to grow in an interest-bearing account until your bill comes due.
Credit gives you an out. Using a traditional credit card makes it easier to reverse the charges if you get into a dispute with a merchant or vendor.
Credit shields you from liability. If someone gets hold of your credit card and wracks up a laundry list of charges, you're typically responsible for only $50 worth of fraudulent charges. If you're unfortunate enough to have your debit card stolen, you may be liable for as much as $500 in unauthorized purchases, unless you report the theft within two business days.