Money

I like Jim Kukral. He’s got a new book coming out called Attention! This Book Will Make You Money: How to Use Attention-Getting Online Marketing to Increase Your Revenue (amazon affiliate link). First, it’s a straightforward title. I’m sure he’ll sell it well for the folks who want that kind of thing.

But second, his promotions are starting up, and I love them. You want to buy the book? Click that Amazon link.

But, if you want to get it FREE, you can click here.

See what I mean? Clever.

Photo credit Affiliate (Shawn Collins)

Online Video Daily: Another Failed Digital Model Scrambles To The iPad Lifeboat — How much more legacy media can the iPad be expected to save? Newspapers and magazines, having failed to make the money they wanted on the Web, are lurching towards the tablet format in the hopes the larger, lusher platform will attract more serious ad and consumer dollars. And now one of the biggest disappointments in early mobile media, mobile TV, makes its play for the iPad. Cellular industry chipmaker Qualcomm has created a device that will connect its network of streaming live broadcasts to a WiFi iPad. The small unit taps into a network that Qualcomm grew for its MediaFLO over the past four years.

Check out this free 31-page PDF report called How to Have a Great Life and a Great Business (Especially if You’re Not the “Business” Type).

It not only ties together the themes we’ve touched on so far in the Lateral Action Entrepreneur series, but also delivers practical ideas on starting a business that leads to more than just money.

Here’s what you’ll discover:

• Why I quit my cushy law firm job and turned to online publishing.
• How I failed miserably.
• How I then succeeded miserably.
• How I learned my lesson the hard way.
• The allure of the global microbrand.
• The rise of the “feeder” business.
• Why small is beautiful (and powerful).
• The 37signals approach to market research.
• Real-life examples of “smartly small” entrepreneurs.

Plus, you’ll get an examination of the 6 critical components of smart entrepreneurship:

1. Create (Don’t Compete)
2. Lead (Don’t Manage)
3. Communicate (Don’t be Shy)
4. Automate (Don’t Duplicate)
5. Accelerate (Don’t Stand Still)
6. Succeed (Don’t Stress)

The report is available here. You’ll also get full optimized transcripts of our recent seminars with Steven Pressfield and Jason Fried.

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of Lateral Action. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

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SwearJarr is a unique idea that asks those that swear on Twitter to donate to the jar.  The money raised is split between two charities each month.  According to the statistics they collected, over 425,000 swear words a day cross the public stream.

Now they cannot force you to donate, but allow you to search your stream and give suggestions as well as prompt others.  The top swearing celebrities are listed on the bottom right and you are free to check anyone with a public stream.

Donations collected have a small 7.5% fee to SwearJarr for hosting, credit card fees and over all administration.  Not bad at all since the rest goes to charity.

Back in April, I wrote a post about Daniel Pink's new book, Drive, in which he highlights the rather stunning amount of counterintuitive research that suggests that money can actually make people less motivated to do creative works. Since then, I got a copy of the book myself, but it's in the stack with about five books that I want to get to before it, so I may not get to it for a while. However, a lot of folks have been passing around this great video of a 10 minute presentation that Pink did, which was then whiteboard animated. It's really well done and fun to watch and basically summarizes the idea in the book: The same point is made in the presentation, but it clarifies it a bit. It's not that money isn't important. That finding would make little sense at all. As people note all the time, you need to be able to make money to survive. But, it's that once people have a base level of money that makes them comfortable, using monetary incentives to get them to do creative work fails. Not just fails, but leads to worse performance. As we noted in the original blog post about this, my initial inkling was that this highlighted a point often forgotten by economists and non-economists alike: while marginal benefit is often considered in terms of dollars, that doesn't mean that cash is the the equivalent of marginal benefit. That is, you can't just replace other benefits with cash. Sometimes people value other types of rewards even greater than the equivalent in cash. And, Pink's book and presentation highlight how it's often things like meaning and working on something fulfilling that are much more beneficial to people than cash. So it's not that money is bad for creativity -- but that having a direct pay-for-performance type scheme seems to create negative consequences when it comes to cognitive work (it works fine for repetitive work, however) -- and other types of non-monetary rewards are a lot more effective.

And while it isn't discussed in the presentation (and I don't know if it's discussed in the book), I wonder if the high monetary rewards in a "if you do this task, we'll give you $x amount" manner actually has a strong cognitive cost. That is, the pressure to then do the task well in order to "earn" that money actually ends up causing a creativity cost that takes away from the output. When you're just doing creative work for non-cash rewards, the pressure doesn't feel quite as strong. When you put the dollar signs in, it adds mental costs, and those costs outweigh the cash rewards. It's even possible, then, that the higher the cash reward, the greater the mental costs.

Related to all of this, Clay Shirky has also just come out with a new book, Cognitive Surplus (which isn't yet in the pile on my desk, but probably will be soon) that builds on an idea that he's talked about for years: about how all these claims that people doing stuff online for free is a "waste" totally misses the point. For the past few decades, people have devoted billions of hours to watching television. Yet, with the internet, rather than watching TV, they're actually doing some creative work (sometimes for free). So when looked at in isolation, doing stuff for free may seem weird, when combined in the larger scheme of things as a substitute for mind-numbing TV watching, it's actually a huge advancement.

Wired had the smart idea of having Shirky and Pink sit down and chat with each other, and they rehash some of these ideas, and how the concepts put forth in the two books seem to overlap. Moving people away from merely consuming content towards creating content leads to a huge boost in creativity and creative output -- exactly what we've seen happening. And, it's not because of monetary incentives -- in fact, it's often because of the exact opposite.

The more you think about it, the more this all makes sense, and the more you realize just how screwed up so many incentive structures are today, because so many people think that purely monetary incentives work best.

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Richard Florida posted about The Great Car Reset, talking about how America’s passion for cars might be waning a bit. In another story, with video, Florida talked about how we should rethink home ownership (the video is below – click through if you can’t see it). He’s not wrong in either case, or rather, it’s something to consider.

I grew up thinking home ownership was the goal. I have a loft in northern Massachusetts that’s about 955 square feet, with a wife and two kids and two cats in it. It’s a wee bit small. So, I’ve been thinking about homes and clicking the occasional real estate link that Kat sends me. But do I want to own?

We use to think homes were important places to store equity. Wow, that sure didn’t work out for a lot of people in the last few years. Even if a home stores equity, you can’t actually get at that money until you sell, so it’s money that’s not being used. In essence, it’s not earning you anything if it’s just sitting there in the home, still. So, a home as a simple residence isn’t exactly a great investment these days (at least by some people’s thinking).

What about cars? Cars depreciate the moment you buy them. They rarely go up in value. They require maintenance, parking fees, etc. And we usually own cars when we live in the suburbs, but that brings us back to the real estate question, and whether or not we even want to be in the suburbs any more. If we reurbanize, if we rethink our cities, if we rework how we work, would we need to throw $20,000 or more into something that just moves us from A to B?

I’m just throwing this all out there to talk about, to think about. The video is interesting, too. What do you think?

From The Burden of Home Ownership.

★ The Good and the Bad Regarding AT&T’s New Data Plans —

Good: The big plan, “DataPro”, now costs $25/month and gives you 2 GB per month. That’s $5 cheaper than the previous “unlimited” plan, and, according to AT&T, 98 percent of their current smartphone customers use less than 2 GB per month. Almost all current iPhone users should save some money, even if just $5 per month. (I use about 500 MB per month, on average, and the most I’ve used in the past year is 1 GB.)

Good: The bandwidth overage fee for DataPro is a reasonable $10 for each extra gigabyte. Verizon and Sprint charge around $50 per extra gigabyte in overage fees. If you use more than 2 GB per month, you deserve to pay more than the rest of us who do not. Why is this hard to understand?

Good: These plans are for all smartphones. No more discrepancies between what’s allowed for BlackBerrys or Android phones (e.g. tethering) and what’s allowed for the iPhone.

Good: $15/month for the 200 MB/month “DataPlus” plan is a great starting price, and AT&T claims that 65 percent of their smartphone users use less than that. I thoroughly doubt that 65 percent of their iPhone users use less than that, but I’ll bet many do.

Bad: The overage charges for that DataPlus plan are shitty. They get charged more — $15 — for another measly 200 MB. That’s usurious. For $15, they should get an entire extra gigabyte.

Bad: Tethering is finally going to be supported — a year after it was supported on numerous other iPhone carriers around the world. But tethering costs $20/month and you don’t get any extra bandwidth at all. If you don’t get extra bandwidth, what are you paying for? It’s one thing to charge extra for tethering on an “unlimited” data plan, but it’s outrageous to charge $20 when the bandwidth is already capped. They should just include tethering support at no additional charge in the DataPro plan. (That’s what Rogers does in Canada, after running a six-month experiment to see how it worked out.)

Bad: Why did they change the plans for the iPad so soon after it was announced? What kind of company has a data plan for a flagship product, the iPad 3G — what appears to be the flagship product of the entire industry this year — available for just 30 days before changing the terms significantly? The “$30/month for unlimited, cancel or downgrade at any time” deal was a highly touted part of the iPad introduction. $25 for 2 GB isn’t bad at all, but it’s just downright weird for it to change so soon after the iPad 3G went on sale.

iPhone OS 4 and Multitasking

Remember too, that Pandora is coming. I know Pandora already has a popular iPhone app, but I seldom use it because it doesn’t play in the background. It will soon, and once it does, I’ll be using it. I’m sure I’m not alone. How’s that (and Skype, and other background streaming services) going to affect monthly bandwidth averages for iPhone users?

Lower Monthly Fees and Market Share

I don’t expect iPhone retail prices to drop this year. I think $99 / $199 / $299 are price points Apple wants to maintain. But these aren’t the real prices for iPhones. They’re subsidized, paid for by AT&T in exchange for all U.S. iPhones being locked to two-year AT&T contracts. Economically, the low-end iPhone could surely be “free”, and the higher models cheaper. But there’s a psychological branding angle that Apple wants to maintain. Apple wants the iPhone to be perceived as an affordable luxury item, not a cheap or free gadget.

A $99 entry-level purchase price is not going to keep many people from getting an iPhone. The biggest barrier for many consumers, I think, is the size of the monthly bill. Under the old rates — where there’s one and only one mandatory iPhone data plan, the cheapest plan you could get was $70/month: $40 for 450 voice minutes, $30 for data, and no included SMS messages. Now, under the new plan, you can pay just $55/month: $40 for voice and $15 for the DataPlus plan. That’s a lot closer to the sort of monthly charges that non-smartphone users are used to.

(Maybe I’m wrong on this, though. What if this month’s new next-generation iPhone goes on sales for $199/299, but the 3GS drops below $99, in a move for market share?)

Compared to MiFi

Before I decided to get an iPad 3G, I thought about sticking with a Wi-Fi-only iPad and getting a MiFi from Verizon or Sprint. The advantage to getting a MiFi: it would work with all of my computers: iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro. The downsides: a 5 GB plan is $60/month, and I’d wind up with another gadget (and charger) to schlep around.

AT&T’s $20 charge just to enable tethering is bullshit, but even combined with an iPad 3G data plan (so as to get 3G service for both an iPad and a MacBook) it’s a lot cheaper than a MiFi — especially if you can get by with the $15/month iPad plan most months, as I expect I’ll be able to. And Fraser Speirs makes the case in this piece that the schlepping/annoyance factor with the MiFi ought not be discounted:

When using the 3 MiFi, there is too much setup involved for casual use. A lot of this is down to the poor design of the 3 MiFi. Here’s what you do to get online:

• Power on the MiFi
• Wait for it to acquire the network (20 seconds, in my absolute-best-case experience - usually much, much worse)
• Turn on the WiFi radio - another 10 second operation
• Turn on the 3G radio - 10 seconds to turn on, another 10 to get to 3G status
• Unlock the iPad, get it associated with the MiFi, get an IP address - another 10-15 seconds

Compare to the 3G iPad: you unlock it, you’re online.

Duncan Davidson expects to save money ($20 bullshit tethering fee notwithstanding) as well:

Running the numbers, if I had been able to use my iPhone for data tethering over the last six months — paying the $20/mo tether charge and $10 for the overage — I would have saved $230 over paying my $60/mo bill to Sprint. Factoring in the $5/mo difference in monthly price, I can expect to save $260 over the last six months of this year if I drop my Sprint card and move to tethering via my iPhone.

So while AT&T’s new plans are not entirely good news, the good outweighs the bad overall.

BillShrink chief executive Peter Pham just announced that he’s leaving the startup for Trinity Ventures, where he will serve as an entrepreneur in residence.

The Redwood City, Calif. company helps users save money by looking at their usage of things like cell phones and credit cards, then recommending new plans and options. It was founded by Schwark Satyavalu and Samir Kothari, and Pham came on in 2008 from Photobucket, where he was vice president of business development.

BillShrink hasn’t shared its user numbers with me, but it seems to be doing well — it has grown to 22 new employees, has gotten coverage from major television networks as a money-saving tool, and it is steadily expanding its services, most recently with the addition of cable and satellite television plans.

Satyavalou, who has been serving as BillShrink’s president, will reassume the CEO position. Judging from Pham’s blog post, it sounds like he will be using his EIR position at Trinity to search for a cool new startup to join:

I always live and breathe what I’m doing, and for the past two years it has been BillShrink.

However, like many entrepreneurs, I always have new ideas brewing. Knowing the time to pursue those ideas is key. This is that time. So I have decided to join my mentor Gus Tai at Trinity Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence. Stay tuned for what’s next for me.

Trinity led BillShrink’s $8 million second round.

iWork for the iPad —

iWork for the iPad is a post from Chris Pirillo

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I was at a conference a few weeks ago, and realized I hadn’t taken my presentation with me! I had the iPad on the trip, so I purchased Keynote and threw it on there. I created a pretty awesome presentation in just minutes. For my needs, it was more than sufficient. It’s perfect if you need to create presentations and things of that nature on the fly. The software only cost me right around ten dollars, so I was even more happy at how well it worked.

I also ended up picking up Pages. I don’t really like the regular notes application, so I decided to give this a try. Again, this application was only ten bucks. I’m very appreciative of the features that Apple just released. I like being able to turn the iPad into landscape mode instead of portrait and still have Pages work properly. Pages definitely isn’t perfect. If you want my opinion, I think you should likely wait to buy it. There are other document-editing programs out there that you can grab.

Then, I was lucky enough to have Alex donate Numbers to me for the iPad. If you need spreadsheets, I’d say the implementation of Numbers on the iPad is well worth the money it costs. It’s very comprehensive and works really well. They’ve done a very good job with this app to optimize it for the iPad.

If you don’t need the apps, don’t get them. I feel there are much better things available at lower prices. What are your thoughts if you’re using any part of the iWork suite on your iPad?

• iWork 09: The Missing Manual
• Apple Training Series: iWork 09
• iWork ‘09 Portable Genius
• iWork ‘09: The Missing Manual
• Apple iWork ‘09 – Includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. Single User License.
• iWork ‘09
• iWork ‘09 Family Pack
• iLife ‘09 + iWork ‘09 – Training Bundle (Video Tutorials)

Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or download the video:

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• Productivity on the iPad
• How do You Fall Asleep?
• Steve Jobs Thinks iPhoto is Web 2.0?! Idiot…
• iPad Launches in the UK With Lines Around the Block
• iPod or iPad?
• Did Apple Forsake Its Community
• Make a Backup of Your iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad Apps List
• Which iPad Should I Buy?
• Is Jailbreaking an iPhone or iPad Bad?
• How to Set up an iPad

I’ve been active online for 9 years now. With one exception, nothing I’ve done online has brought me closer to making 25-year friends. Life online rewards breadth, not depth. As gratifying as it may be to have 1 million “visitors” read at least one word of my latest online book, chances are none of those visitors will turn into people who turn into friends who turn into 25-year friends.

How many 25-year friends can you hope to make in one lifetime? 25 years is a long time. That’s half of a short life, a third of a normal life, or a quarter of an extraordinary life. Depending on when you start counting, 25 years might include some or all of growing up, graduating from multiple schools, getting married (or remarried), having (and raising) kids, changing jobs, or changing careers.

But a 25-year friend is not just “a friend for 25 years.” It’s not the passage of time that matters as much as the “of course”-ness of it all. Of course I want to hear about your breakup. Of course you can come over anytime. Of course I’ll help you move. Of course you’ll be my best man, and I yours. Of course we’ll be each other’s godfathers. Of course you’ll “lend” me some money when I hit hard times. 25 years of “of course.”

And in the end, and I mean the very end, of course you’ll come visit me when I’m all but paralyzed. Of course you’ll go outside to throw a ball around with my son while the paramedics take me off to the hospital, again. After I can’t so much as lift my legs, of course you’ll sit with me in the hospital and help me get comfortable every five minutes. After I can’t feed myself, of course you’ll ignore the doctor’s orders and sneak in some cheese bisque and feed me one spoonful at a time. And after I can’t change myself, of course you’ll call the nurse to say there’s shit running down my leg, and of course you’ll stick around to help the nurse roll me over so she can wipe me down, then roll me the other way so she can change out my sheets.

A good friend will help you move. A great friend will help you move a body. A 25-year friend will help you move your own body.

And when the nurse asks, “Family? Friend?” of course you’ll say, “25-year friend.” And she’ll say, “25-year friend. What a thing.”

In the end, how many 25-year friends can you hope to make in one lifetime? How many do you really need? I would have said “only one,” but it turns out what I meant was “one who will outlive me.”

So, two.

Mark Zuckerberg: I Donated to Diaspora project —

You might expect that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg would dismiss the four NYU college students who want to take on Facebook’s dominance of social networking by building a distributed, open alternative that includes a way for people to run their own servers.

But instead, Zuckerberg said he donated to the Diaspora project, adding to the $190,000 it has raised, in part because he appreciates their drive to change the world. (Note: This reporter followed up with Facebook’s press office Thursday to ask how much Zuckerberg donated to Diaspora, but the press office said they’d rather not answer.)

In an interview with Wired.com on Wednesday after announcing simpler privacy controls for Facebook, Zuckerberg also talked about where he sees the site going, his drive to make the world more open, why the face in Facebook is so important and why he wouldn’t start a social network if he were launching a site today.

Wired.com: What do you think of the push for an open, federated social network and the four NYU students who raised $200,000 for the Diaspora project without having a single line of code?

Zuckerberg: I donated. I think it is a cool idea.

Actually it reminds me of this cool thing we built early on called Wirehog. Early on, it was clear that users wanted more photos on the site. There were a set of users who would change their one profile picture every day. And we looked at that data and took that as people want to share more photos.

But photos are expensive and we didn’t have an infrastructure. We were just trying to grow the site and add more colleges to the site. So we built this personal web server that people could install on their computer where they could put all their files on it — which at the time were mostly photos but it supported videos and music — and share it with your friends. So in a way it was the prototypical platform app, but it was also a decentralized way to share information.

So I think it is a cool idea just based on that.

I think it is cool people are trying to do it. I see a little of myself in them. It’s just their approach that the world could be better and saying, “We should try to do it.”

(Editor’s note: Wirehog was killed off by Facebook after Facebook’s then-president Sean Parker — who co-founded Napster — argued that Wirehog would face the same ugly legal death that the infamous peer-to-peer music sharing site did. On Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Parker called it “illegal” and said he “put a bullet in it.”)

In an interesting way, a lot of the privacy stuff is much easier to do in a centralized environment. Some of the simple stuff like friend-to-friend, peer-to-peer stuff is simple, but once you start getting into friends-of-friends, you start running into problems like we did with Wirehog. If someone can come up with a new approach, then [that's] awesome.

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Google now has roughly $26 billion in cash on hand. That mountain of money has apparently been getting very conservative returns according to an article appearing in Businessweek. The article also discusses how Google has now turned its formidable technology and software prowess on its short term investments to more aggressively manage its portfolio.  Accordingly Google [...]

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Q&A: Seattle angel Geoff Entress — If you’re an entrepreneur looking for money in Seattle, Geoff Entress is a pretty good guy to know. The 46-year-old Bainbridge Island resident has invested in 50 startup companies over the past decade, and the backer of Isilon Systems, Cheezburger Network and Swype is on the prowl for even more.