Untethered Dreams

In case you’re not familiar with Google’s Sitelinks, it’s those ‘additional’ links that (up to recently only) show up for the 1st result in Google’s search results if the site in question had distinctive categorized content. Ok, that was a mouthful. Here’s a concrete example. One of the sites that we run, MvixCommunity, which is a forum for discussing Mvix products shows up as the 1st result when you search for ‘mvix forums’, and it has additional sitelinks under the result. Here’s a screenshot:

Google recently decided to share that love a bit, and now sites further down in the listings will also get Sitelinks if they are so deserving. They won’t get the full treatement, but at least they’ll get a line with up to 4 such links.

So far, Google does not describe exactly how those links are auto-generated, but you can block some of those links via Google’s Webmaster Tools.

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At a recent Meet the Angels event in Atlanta, the panelists made sure entrepreneurs knew that angels “should be a last resort”. While this was shocking for the entrepreneurs, the panelist described working with Angels is “expensive and onerous” and suggest that if you can avoid it, you should. So what’s an entrepreneur to do?

The panel suggests that you bootstrap your company so you can concentrate on solving the problem your business targets rather than working to raise capital for your company.

It almost goes without saying, but Angels are scrutinizing every deal much closer than only six to nine months ago due to investor exits flatlining because of the credit market paralysis.

Source: Atlanta Business Chronicle

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My partner at Felthos Foundry and I finally bit the bullet and hired a Virtual Assistant firm, Get Friday, this past month after reading about Tim Ferriss’ successes with VAs in The 4-Hour Workweek. We opted to try the service for a few months starting with the Basic-20 plan that includes 20 hours for $200 with additional hours at $12/hour. If the VA brings value, we plan to expand to 40 or more hours.

While my padna may have a different take, I currently only have a lukewarm feeling with our first 20 hours. We’ve assigned four tasks including finding sites to locate gadget writers for Gizmos for Geeks, transcribe some audio recordings from our Livescribe sessions at CES, create a spreadsheet of the top 10 web mail providers and determine their antivirus/antispam/antiphishing capabilities and information on cloud-based web hosting companies including if they really are cloud-based web hosters and pricing.
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Regardless of the business you’re in or the one you’re trying to break into, I can’t underestimate the value in attending conferences. Conferences are where you learn more about the field you’re interested in through talks, seminars and speaking with other attendees. Conferences are also where you meet others in that field’s community - experts, enthusiasts, like-minded entrepreneurs, even wanna-be members.

You’ve heard the saying that human communication is only 10% verbal. Well, speaking to someone face to face gives you so much more information than e-mail or even speaking over the phone. You will learn more in a few days than you will in weeks or possibly months of other forms of research.

Invest the time and money to attend at least one conference this year, if not the next few months.

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The Affiliate Summit West conference currently is in session in Las Vegas. The three day conference attracts the best and brightest affiliates as well as upcoming affiliates and includes an exhibit hall with affiliate merchants, vendors and networks. There are multiple educational tracks lead by leaders in the industry.

ASW ’09’s keynote was given by Gary Vaynerchuk who is the star of Wine Library TV and Director of Operations at Wine Library in Springfield, NJ as well as one hell of a motivational speaker. The keynote is well worth watching, but only if you want to be inspired to make money.

Streaming .TV shows by Ustream

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According to the National Bureau of Economic Research on December 1st, 2008, the US economy has been in a recession for all of 2008 starting in December 2007. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of “negative growth” (stupid oxymorons) or the GDP.

According to the NBER, the expansion that ended in December 2007 began in November 2001. Considering most expansions last for 38 months… we were due.

In times of financial turmoil, wouldn’t it be easier to work for a big company? As an employee of a Fortune 20 company, I’d argue the exact opposite. For starters, while the recession has been around for only one year, my company has posted negative growth for a full two years and expects the trend to continue through 2009. So 2007 was worse than 2006, 2008 was worse than 2007 and it’s expected 2009 will be worse than 2008. Due to this negative growth, the company has been forced to perform a RIF (Reduction In Force). While I personally have not been affected, quite a few people from my group were. Granted the company I work for will not go under anytime soon, but there is no guarantee that my employment is safe even if I am a rock star. At least if you run your own business, you completely control your destiny.

In my view, a recession is the perfect time to start an online business or side business in order to build some cushion in case you are caught up in a RIF. What’s the worst that could happen? Perhaps you’ll find the right niche and fire your corporate job!

Technorati Tags: recession, start business, layoff, reduction in force, online business, side business

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While working on special projects for Felthos Foundry that will be revealed in the near future, I found developing only on the QA Server a bit cumbersome as the connection was not always quick and I could not completely modify the QA site as needed.

Realizing the limitations, I brought the code back to my personal development machine which happens to be a Mac. This decision works from a engineering standpoint, but the code was not available to my padna, I could not easily access the code from outside my house and now the company must rely that I make backups of the code.

To address the concerns of backups and remove access to the files by myself and my padna, I wrote a quick little script with rsync. Rsync is an open source utility the provides quick incremental file transfer and is available under the GNU General Public License. Rsync typically comes packaged on most linux distros and OS X had it pre-installed.

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I have neglected this site for some time between working some special projects for Felthos Foundry and receiving a promotion at work climbing yet another rung on the ladder to becoming a corporate slave. The new position unfortunately steals a bit of my time hindering my dreams of becoming untethered from the corporate life.

My padna and I have some excellent ideas that are unique, from our research, and are products and services that we would actually spend money on, so we’d expect others would as well. Unfortunately with my extra time commitments due to my promotion, I really am struggling to work on these products and services.

Unfortunately coming up with the best strategies mean nothing if you can’t execute, so think before you accept that promotion at work. Sure, the extra coin in your pocket is nice, but if that job is not part of what you want your career path to be, you’ll just fail to reach your real goals.

Technorati Tags: strategy, execute, promotion

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Twitter is one more way in which you can promote your blog, and if you use Wordpress as your blogging platform, then one very useful plugin is one that automatically publishes your latest posts to your Twitter account.

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