Clipmarks | rmowery's BusinessConcepts collection

TIME: getting rich off those who work for free

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 03:55:47 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Kropotkin was an aristocrat who, after being imprisoned for his insurrectionist activities, escaped and fled to England in 1876. He also drew the first good topographic maps of Siberia and wrote a memoir of his revolutionary days that has become a minor classic. More to the point, he proposed in his 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that the survival of animal species and much of human progress depended on the tendency to help others.

That I even know of Kropotkin comes courtesy of the Wikipedia entry for the "gift economy," the current term of art for this altruistic approach. Wikipedia is, of course, a prime example of the gift economy at work. Argue about its inaccuracies all you want, but the volunteer-authored online encyclopedia is on its way to becoming (if it isn't already) the world's dominant reference resource.

Tags: peter kropotkin, human motivation, psychology, open source, free, russian

Web forums replacing coffee shops for farmers

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 14:47:24 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

Web forums replacing coffee shops for farmers

Story Highlights

• Online farm forums growing in popularity among farmers
• Report: Fifty-one percent of U.S. farms have Internet access
• Farmers share advice, tips that can save them money

MARTINSVILLE, Ohio (AP) -- Tucked away in the den of his 127-year-old farmhouse, Ed Winkle huddles over his computer. The screen's soft glow lights up his eyeglasses, reflecting messages about tractors, corn hybrids and crop insurance.

Winkle is checking the latest postings on his favorite Internet farm forum.

Advice from fellow farmers around the country has enabled him to increase his corn and soybean production, better market his crops, learn how to rebuild engines and get good tires for his tractor.

Online message boards and chat rooms are replacing rural coffee shops and feed mills as places for farmers to talk farming and trade tips as more of rural America goes online.

"You get the best thinkers in agriculture," Winkle said of the forums. "You're mixing such a diverse group of people -- from different areas, from different backgrounds, different experiences, different ways of farming."

Fifty-one percent of U.S. farms have Internet access, according to a July 2005 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up from 48 percent in 2003.

More than two-thirds of them, however, still use dial-up modems to connect.

The popularity of online farm forums has grown as well, said Mack Strickland, an agricultural engineer at Purdue University and farm-computer expert. Some forums claim to have as many as 30,000 registered users.

Tags: web, farms, farmers, farming, internet, farm forums

Cutting through the clutter to get things done

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:22:54 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

Cutting through the clutter to get things done

POSTED: 9:22 a.m. EST, February 9, 2007

Story Highlights

• "Getting Things Done" has sold more than 500,000 copies
• Book published in 23 languages
• David Allen has huge following with bloggers
• Allen calls the book "advanced common sense"

(CNN) -- Management consultant David Allen is a best-selling author, runs a multimillion dollar company and travels the country teaching executives to be more productive.

By David E. Williams
CNN

Allen, 61, is best known for his book "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity." The book, published in 2001, was the 46th most popular book on Amazon.com on Thursday.

Tags: gtd, organize, getting things done, work, david allen

Emmitt Smith: Real Estate Tycoon

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 15:26:13 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: money.cnn.com

Emmitt Smith: Cowboy, dancer, real estate tycoon

Emmitt Smith has covered a lot of real estate on the football field and the dance floor. Now he's developing it, says Fortune's Roy Johnson.

(Fortune Magazine) -- On a chilly winter day in Dallas, the most prolific running back in National Football League history is being tackled at every turn. As Emmitt Smith climbs into his silver Hummer and heads to lunch, a young woman pulls alongside, powers open her passenger-side window, and, with a syrupy Texas drawl, yells, "I'm soooo proud of you." Minutes later in the restaurant, women of all ages greet him like a favorite son, and men shake his hand with Texas pride.

But none of this adulation has a thing to do with the many highlights Smith produced as a member of the Dallas Cowboys during his 15-year, sure-to-be-Hall-of-Fame career. "You sure did do some dancin'!" bellows one barrel-chested fellow in the oil business. Smith flashes that familiar killer smile and thanks the man, just as he does every well-wisher. Finally sitting down, he can only shake his head. "This is nothing," he says. "The ballroom dancing crowd? They're out of control."

Being celebrated more for tango than for touchdowns isn't exactly how Smith, 37, envisioned life after pro football. But that's what happens when you win one of television's most popular reality-show competitions, ABC's "Dancing With the Stars." Smith tapped and twirled his way to the surprise victory last fall, which only broadened his circle of admirers. "No one expected me to be able to move around on the dance floor," Smith says proudly, "including my wife."

Tags: emmitt smith, real estate, dallas, properties, business

Tax Takers Send in the Spiders

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:59:21 GMT

clipped by: rmowery
clipper's remarks: Time to start creating some exterminators to kill these tax spiders.

Clip Source: www.wired.com

Tax Takers Send in the Spiders

By Quinn Norton| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Jan, 25, 2007

Websites around the world are getting a new computerized visitor among the Googlebots and Yahoo web spiders: The taxman. A five-nation tax enforcement cartel has been quietly cracking down on suspected internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated web crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites, and track operators of online shops, poker and porn sites.

The "Xenon" program -- a reference to the super-bright auto headlights that light up dark places -- was started in The Netherlands in 2004 by the Dutch equivalent of the IRS, Belastingdienst. It has since been expanded and enhanced by international group of tax authorities in Austria, Denmark, Britain and Canada, with the assistance of Amsterdam-based data mining firm Sentient Machine Research.

Xenon is primarily a spider: a program that downloads a web page, then traverses its links and downloads those as well, ad infinitum. In this manner spiders can create huge datasets of web material, while preserving the relationships between pages at the moment they were spidered -- something that can reveal a lot about the people that made the pages.

Tags: irs, government, tax man, taxing, taxes, web spiders, tgax spiders

The 10 Riskiest Businesses To Start

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:06:08 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

01.18.07, 4:30 PM ET

The 10 Riskiest Businesses To Start

The numbers aren't pretty.

While some two-thirds of small firms make it past the two-year mark, just 44% can hack it for four years, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And by "hack it," we're just talking survival rates here: Plenty of those "survivors" are choking down ramen noodles to keep the lights on.

If those odds don't scare you off, consider too that some industries may be inherently tougher to crack than others. Your friends might think that you rival Mario Batali in the kitchen, or that you can go sole for sole with the likes of Kenneth Cole (nyse: KCP - news - people ). But the sober truth is that it takes more than talent to run a restaurant, a clothing boutique and a host of other ventures. Sadly, some of the most enticing industries are also the riskiest.

Tags: business, forbes, risk, small business

The Internet’s Biggest Google Whores

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 05:51:31 GMT

clipped by: rmowery
clipper's remarks: WOW! Some of these folks are raking in the cash!

Clip Source: www.johnchow.com

The following is a list of the Internet’s eight biggest Google AdSense publishers. The information was compiled from interviews and articles found on the Internet. Whenever possible, I list the source of the information.

Clip Source: www.johnchow.com

September 25th, 2006 by John Chow

Clip Source: www.johnchow.com

I apologize in advance if I missed anyone on the list. If you make more than the people listed, please send me proof of your Google AdSense earnings and I will add you on the next time the list is updated. This is a list of individual site owners - people just like you and me. Big corporate AdSense publishers like AOL are excluded.

1: Markus Frind: PlentyOfFish.com - $300,000 per month

Markus Frind is a local Vancouverite who is turning the online dating world upside down. His site, Plentyoffish.com is biggest free dating site on the Internet. Plentyoffish.com receives up to 500 million page views per month and make over $10,000 per day for Markus, who runs the site from home.

You think a site this big would be staffed by a hundred people but the only employee that Markus has is his girlfriend, who helps to answer the emails. Markus coded Plenty of Fish all by himself. The site is lean and mean and requires only four servers to handle all that traffic.

Doubts about Makus’s Google earnings were silenced when he posted this $900,000 check from Google. According to Markus’s blog entry, the check represented two months of AdSense earnings.

Tags: google, adsense, money, making money, google whores

ThinkingPHP and beyond

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:39:48 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.thinkingphp.org

Well I don’t know, but if this post makes it to digg.com’s homepage, I’ll donate 75% of the ad income generated by it to the foundation. So if you’ve not donated, anything to the best PHP framework so far, go ahead and digg this story! But let’s get the promised article going:

#1 - Leverage the community to provide commercial support:
The idea of using paid support to finance the costs of open source development is old and not very effective. The problem is that the developers are already way too busy maintaining the project, and there is no money for paying people to deliver support. However, while talking in #cakephp today, a completly new idea was born. What would happen if you would leverage the real power of open source to deliver the support? The people who are doing the support for free right now anyway? The Community!. All you have to do is to setup a web site where newbies can sign up and pay $5-10 to get a support account with 5-10 credits. Whenever they ask a question it’s gonna cost them 1 or more credits to have it answered. The people who answer this questions are simply active members of the community who answer those questions for free and let the money go to the foundation. And using credits instead of single transactions is a practical way to process micropayments via paypal without loosing most of the money on transaction fees! But before I loose myself in the details of this new idea, here comes the next:

Tags: opensource php, open source marketing, business, business concepts

How $150 from 5 customers turned into $15 million

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 19:48:04 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: kimklaverblogs.blogspot.com

How $150 from 5 customers turned into $15 million

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Tuesday is customer day

This is a story about an entrepreneurial woman - an old friend of mine who 19 years ago was just another soul looking for something of her own. It all started with her first 5 customers...

"You know Kim, when I was first approached about this business, I had been looking for something of my own for a few years already. Back then, my husband was a carpenter, and I wanted to do something, too. I had started an aerobics studio, a hair salon, and then a dog grooming kennel. They all went down the tubes, and we spent most of our savings.

"One day an acquaintance stopped by to show us a little water filter gizmo you could put on sink, and said we could earn $30 for each one we sold. Since my husband remodeled kitchens sometimes, and we didn't especially like our drinking water that much, this seemed like a pretty good thing to try. We figured I could set up appointments, and if we sold one per week, we'd add $150 to our monthly income. That sounded good to us. Well, you just cannot imagine our excitement when he brought in an extra $150 that first month. Five sales!

Tags: entrepreneur, business, start small, water filter

Doing it for free

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:53:19 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: sethgodin.typepad.com

Doing it for free

I was reading John Hammond's biography entry, (John discovered Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen and yes, Count Basie) and I noticed that he was independently wealthy.

Woz wasn't looking to make a lot of money when he invented the Apple computer, and Nolan Bushnell certainly didn't imagine he was creating the video game industry when he invented Pong. Cory and the rest of the boingboing team had no revenue for years, and Digg and Yahoo! and dozens of other key websites were started without an eye on profit, never mind revenue. The same thing is true for Julia Child and Gene Roddenberry and Dean Kamen.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that pioneers are almost never in it for the money. The smart ones figure out how to take a remarkable innovation and turn it into a living (or a bigger than big payout) but not the other way around. I think the reason is pretty obvious: when you try to make a profit from your innovation, you stop innovating too soon. You take the short payout because it's too hard to stick around for the later one.

Irony #1 is that business journalists always ask pioneers about the money. And then they are incredulous when they hear the answer. They make up bogus numbers or just assume the pioneer is lying. They don't see the trend.

Tags: business, creavtivity, mindset, visionaries

Web maverick shakes up status quo again

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 07:20:57 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: money.cnn.com

Skype and Kazaa pioneer Niklas Zennstrom pulls a promising new Wi-Fi startup out of his hat.

Web maverick shakes up status quo again

By Mark Halper, Fortune contributor

August 29 2006: 9:14 AM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- Niklas Zennstrom is a populist Web hero. The 40-year-old Swede has twice co-founded companies that rattled powerful industries by giving away important things to consumers.

Skype is shaking the telecom industry with free phone calls, and before that Kazaa, his maverick music-sharing company, sent shivers through the entertainment business. So keep an eye on a Madrid wireless Internet startup Zennstrom is helping to run called FON, which could upend both the Internet and the mobile-phone industries.

FON is building an international network of free Wi-Fi by enticing people with home Wi-Fi service to share access with fellow "foneros" when anyone in the FON club is within range.

"I'm a great believer in sharing resources to create a virtual-access network," says Zennstrom, an active board member. FON's CEO, 46-year-old serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, shares that vision. "We are a user-generated infrastructure," he says, "not telco-generated."

Tags: niklas zennstrom, skype, fon, kazaa, business

Web Platform Primer - what's available via API?

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 06:46:26 GMT

clipped by: rmowery
clipper's remarks: Why cool overview......

Clip Source: www.readwriteweb.com

August 22, 2006 / 1 comments

Web Platform Primer - what's available via API?

The Web computing platform today encompasses a wide range of functions, a lot of which are accessible via APIs (Application Programming Interface). From the relatively simple bookmarking service del.icio.us, to more complex functionality like Amazon S3's complete virtualization of data storage - it's amazing what can be done nowadays using Web APIs.

In this post, I've categorized the Web platform into 6 infrastructure building blocks and I will briefly outline some of the products that define each one. The common thread is that each product mentioned has an API, which means it can be integrated as a part of other services.

Tags: web20, primer, platform, web platforms, infrastructure

Turn Your iPod into the Ultimate PowerPoint Accessory

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 04:02:24 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.micropersuasion.com

Turn Your iPod into the Ultimate PowerPoint Accessory

This is the second in my series of posts on various gear that I find useful.

Many readers of this blog work in PR or marketing or for Web 2.0 related start-ups. This means you spend a lot of time preparing presentations in either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple's Keynote. What's more, you probably also invest hours rehearsing and traveling to and from various meetings. Oh and if I were a betting man I'd say you carry an iPod. Well, whether you are on Windows or Mac with a few simple steps you can turn your iPod (even an older one) into the ultimate PowerPoint accessory. I am going to focus on PowerPoint here since it's what most people use. The process is similar for Keynote.

Tags: ipod. powerpoint presenter, steve robel, ipod presentations

Architecture of Participation: The Next Big Thing?

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:32:03 GMT

clipped by: rmowery
clipper's remarks: Very good article.

Clip Source: web2.wsj2.com

Architectures of Participation: The Next Big Thing

Well, it seems to be finally happening. The Web 2.0 sites are starting to bubble up -- no pun intended -- to the very top of the traffic charts, with MySpace and then YouTube eclipsing each other in weeks. The Guardian reported yesterday that YouTube is now commanding 3.9% of all Internet traffic, making it the #1 site on the Internet. That's more than impressive given that they only started out in February, 2005. I've been covering MySpace and YouTube in my last two pieces (one, two) because they in particular seem to represent leading edge best practices in the social architectures of large-scale public Web sites. Ostensibly very "Web 2.0", both MySpace and YouTube aggressively "harness the collective intelligence" of their user's combined contributions as their primary offering to the world. In this sense, they have put their architectures of participation at the core of their product design. And wouldn't you know it, it's made them both leaders on the world stage.

Tags: web20, architecture, participation, software design, collective intelligence

The Valley Boys: Silicon Valley Kids making Web2.0

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:34:06 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: etechatwork.com

As you can see, I’m still struggling to keep up with the blog. It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, partly because of my recent (lateral) transfer into a new department, meaning: new responsibilities, a rush to implement/execute new strategies, and a learning curve to boot. Oh well…not everyone can quit their day jobs and blog full time (we should be so lucky, huh?). Anyway, I’ve been meaning to post this one for a while, so—as they say—better late than never, I guess…

Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs: Can You Digg It?

A couple of weeks back, Business Week had a cover story on Kevin Rose (Founder, Digg.com) “…and the new wave of young entrepreneurs running the hottest of the top 100 Web 2.0 companies”, called Valley Boys. It’s a fascinating read that (pardon the pun) digs deep into the growing trend of the “community first” business model that is sweeping the Web 2.0 world (e.g. Digg, YouTube, MySpace, etc.), which has given rise to soaring numbers and, ultimately, resulted in high valuations of these companies and incredible post-bubble acquisition deals (e.g. MySpace = $580 million). And with Digg’s estimated value at ~$200 million, Biz Week pegs Kevin Rose—who retains 30-40% of the company—to have an estimated worth of around a cool $60 million…in just 18 months (since Digg’s launch). Not too shabby, huh? Here’s a quick excerpt from the article:

Tags: valley boys, silicon valley, web20, digg, myspace