Making it on Main Street: Are you looking for the big kahuna?
April 3, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read this comment
Lots of people dream of striking it rich, online and offline, too. Whether it is the Euro-millions lottery or the Powerball, making it big on Wall Street, or selling your company to Google, the prevailing wisdom is that to make it, you need just one big score, one big sale, one big ticket, one…
Others are out there looking for the book, the website, the product, the one thing that is missing in their life that will bring them everything they want in life and more… For blogs like this one, it’s the search for the traffic kahuna (as one product is called), the audience, the reach, … But the odds against each of these events happening are quite staggering.
photo credit: aloshbennett
So what is an ‘ornery person to do given odds like that? Success seems evasive, based on luck, and available to only those who don’t really need it. Each time I hear people talking about their entrepreneurial plans, I had the same concern: if you look for the big one, what are your actual chances of finding it? Not particularly great.
It takes effort, dediction, and time!
Success in any venture requires effort. That effort starts with the initial concept, the preparations for the launch, but most importantly, it requires that you stay focused on the task or goal in the following weeks, months, and even years after launch. Our business reached the eighth year this year, and every day is a struggle at times. But it grows stronger each day as we work on it…
Monday News: A Carnival, Tidying Up, Chinese New Year and our 1st Martian Reader
January 28, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read these 2 comments
What you’ve missed here…
- Saturday Bytes: WMV to FLV and FireFox’s Causing Me Frustration
- Technorati: Why you should bother, how you do it, and the ‘dark side’
- NetWork Solutions: How YOU can gouge your customers in 10 steps or less - a case study
- and our new Advice Column: Your House Is Not YOUR ATM Machine
For the advice column, simply drop your email to us (anonymously, if you wish) and I’ll write InvestorBlogger’s response with some suggestions.
And now the news…
Monday is here, the first day of our holiday at Chinese New Year! Yesterday, we spent the whole of yesterday reorganising the school offices. I had to finish rewiring the computers, too. But it’s done, and the new network will work nicely, I think. One PC will be devoted to running the printers, another to running the network, another to running the photocopier, and another to running our IntraNet Blog, I hope.
So, though we use a local network at school, we’ve distributed services across every PC except the notebook to maintain as much of a system as possible should one PC die. I had intended to network everything to just one PC, but then thought perhaps that wasn’t a good idea if there should be a hardware problem. So our services are distributed to minimize impact of broken systems. BUT we don’t have any extra capacity at the moment which is a pity.
The New Carnival 10th Edition and the new host
Yep, it’s out on the new blog, and posted with 21 good stories, and most of the junk removed. I took a huge paring knife to cut out duplicates, irrelevant stories, popup articles, etc., But I’m glad, the edition is good. Next time, we’ll feature a new section: Chinese New Year is approaching, posts that make special reference to that will be given their own featured section!
Chinese New Year: A time to tidy up
Chinese take a lot of time to clean up before the New Year (February 6th this year!) and I’ve really gone to town to clean up my own clothes closet! But I’m so untidy and disorganised that it took me more than 12 hours to put everthing here…
into here…
and it’s done now… But it was a challenge! And it’s not particularly neat and tidy, but it is sorted out now! What is the secret to being organized, please tell me!?
Amazon’s Big News: Downloads go International!
You’ve got to read this story about Amazon’s announcement:
Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as over 33,000 independent labels. “We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can’t wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future,†said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year.â€Â
I’m skeptical, because their definition of the term ‘international’ may only include Canada, the UK, Japan, France and wherever else there is a localized Amazon site. But here’s hoping.
What’s that guy on Mars doing?
CNET is carrying this picture recently taken from Mars courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University of a 2″ man.
Nasa has finally taken a picture of a Martian: he (or she) is obviously squinting at the ASUS Eee PC with the 7″ screen while browsing InvestorBlogger dot com. What else could the Martian be doing? Suggestions in the comments please!
Upcoming Stories
These are some of the stories I’ll be posting several stories in the next few days:
- What I did with my money
- Security and WordPress: Beefing Up Security for your Blog
- WPBanners: A Fuller Review - Good Value or not?
- blogging: Usability Improvements
Do check back this week to see which is posted.
Panasonic, Prada and Perspectives: Change isn’t that hard, is it?
January 21, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read these 2 comments
Flower shopping: a whole new world view!ÂÂ
Just yesterday, I went with Christine to a flower market in Taipei. This is something I normally hate doing, but this time something twigged: I may not appreciate the enjoyment and satisfaction she has from growing and keeping plants, but I could enjoy another aspect that I already knew about - taking photographs of the specimens. And the new power zoom of my Panasonic Lumix made it that much more fun.
Fashion affects us all
While I was thinking about this, another example sprang to mind: The Devil Wears Prada. Since this movie is set in the fashion world, most of the girls I knew reckoned that I wouldn’t or couldn’t possibly enjoy this movie. But they were wrong! And I was teased mercilessly for enjoying a ‘chick flick’ but I didn’t see it as a ‘chick flick’ at all. Far from it.
What was my secret? I had found something that I really enjoyed in the movie, the intrigue, the lead character called Miranda Priestly - played by Meryl Streep (one of my favorites since I first saw her in “Out of Africa”) - and the whole business of the fashion world. I also loved the idea that the fashion magazines were somehow connected to our daily lives, as Andy Sachs promptly found out, when lashed by Miranda’s tongue in the following diatribe:
Miranda Priestly: [Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit. Andy sniggers because she thinks they look exactly the same] Something funny?
Andy Sachs: No, no, nothing. Y’know, it’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y’know, I’m still learning about all this stuff.
Miranda Priestly: This… ’stuff’? Oh… ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.
But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers.
Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.
Shift your focus: Shift your future
That’s when it suddenly hit home to me, if I’m struggling to understand why something is interesting to other people, I just need to shift my focus to something that I am already familiar with, and perhaps, just perhaps I can make a connection with it that helps me to ‘get it’.
When I first started doing the finances, and handling the money, it was a very difficult time for me, as I had to learn new ideas and unlearn my former prejudices - thinking about, talking about, and taking action on finances weren’t things that came easy to me.
How Things Change
In fact, it would be impossible for me to imagine then that I could be writing a finance column about money, investing, loans, credit cards, blogging and technology (to name a few of my themes!). But somewhere between the date I got married in June 1995 and when we bought the house in 1999, a transition took place in my brain that allowed me to grasp ideas and information that had been ‘foreign’ to me for a long time.
Have you had a similar experience? Share with us. Ever had to tackle something that you had a distaste for? What happened?
AGLOCO is over: Cash Over, Game Over
December 10, 2007 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Comments Off
Earlier this year, CashQuests ran a story on why Agloco wouldn’t ever work… and it’s looking like she might have been right.
I just received this email in my mailbox in the last few minutes,…
Dear kenneth,
We would like to update you on the status of AGLOCO’s operations. We continue to believe in the AGLOCO concept, but our revenue is currently not sufficient to give Members a meaningful distribution. And though there are increases in membership, the resulting revenue is not enough to support operating costs. As a development team we are unable to continue to use our savings to fund the operations. If any Member would like to pursue continuing the operations of AGLOCO, you may contact us at agloco1@live.com .
We would like to thank every Member for supporting our effort to bring a piece of the Internet directly to the user. We hope that we can find a way to keep the operations going.
My heartfelt sympathies go with the development, as they have surely invested a lot of time, energy and money in the project, but it looks like it has been running out of time, since earlier this month. No reaction from John Chow at this time, since he was one of the biggest supporters… but let’s see.
I just hope that their supporters didn’t waste too much money and time themselves… I promoted it for a little while, but it wasn’t worth the effort, and I never liked the Ad-bar so I removed after just a few hours… I’ll be following this story up soon.
So which PC are YOU getting for X’mas?
December 1, 2007 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Comments Off
Products and Services
